A Division Bench of Calcutta High Court on Friday granted an interim stay on Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay’s earlier order to terminate employment of 32,000 primary school teachers of the state till the end of September this year.
The Bench, however, added in the breath that the Bengal Primary Education Board would have to continue to conduct the selection process in exactly the same manner as directed by Justice Gangopadhyay.
Read together, legal experts opined, the stay on employment cancellation of the teachers in question meant little since they would now have to participate afresh in the recruitment process of their vacancies along with the 82,000-odd candidates who qualified the Teachers Eligibility Test (TET), 2014 exams but weren’t given appointments.
The only respite that the teachers under legal scanner would get as a result of the Division Bench order is that they would not be reduced to the rank of para-teachers, as directed by the Single Bench, and would continue to function in their previous capacity for the next four months, a senior High Court lawyer explained.
The interim order was passed by the Bench of Justices Subrata Talukdar and Supratim Bhattacharya after concluding hearing of a challenge petition against Gangopadhyay’s order filed by the primary education board and a section of aggrieved job losers.
The Bench found prima facie merit in the petitioners’ argument that the Single Bench order was passed without allowing the teachers in question to make their case. “The Writ court had the duty to add parties, at least in representative capacity,” the court observed.
On May 12 Gangopadhyay, in an unprecedented one-time job cancellation order in connection with the ongoing cash-for-jobs scam hearings, sacked 36,000 primary teachers recruited by the Board in 2016 as part of its TET-2014 notification on grounds that these teachers lacked the mandatory training qualification and were handed appointment letters by manipulating their final marks by assigning fictitious marks in aptitude tests which were never held.
The number of disqualified teachers was later revised to 32,000 citing a clerical error.
Some 12 lakh candidates appeared for the 2014 TET which took place in October 2015. While 1.25 lakh examinees passed the test, 42,500 candidates were appointed by the Board based on their final marks weightage, leaving 82,000-odd candidates waitlisted. Gangopadhyay’s Bench found that 32,000 recruited candidates were untrained at the time of their recruitment in 2016.
Gandopadhyay order stated: “The Board shall immediately arrange for a recruitment exercise for candidates who were untrained at the time of recruitment (including candidates who have obtained training qualification in the meantime) within a period of 3 (three) months from date only for the candidates who participated in 2016 recruitment process where both interview and aptitude test of all examinees shall be taken and the whole interview process has to be videographed carefully and preserved.”
“It will be a recruitment process under the same Rules and legal procedures under which 2016 recruitment process was conducted. No new or any other candidate shall be allowed to take part in such recruitment test,” the order went on to state while outlining the selection process which the Board must follow.
While the Single Bench stated that waitlisted candidates from 2016 who may have currently crossed the age bar would also be eligible to take part in the new recruitment process, it also directed that the disqualified teachers would work as para-teachers with diminished salaries for the next four months till the selection process was completed.
Gangopadhyay also left an option open for the state government to extract the cost of fresh recruitment from now-jailed former board president Manik Bhattacharya during whose tenure the irregularities took place.
“I welcome the Division Bench order because I find it to be a balanced judgment. It doesn’t matter if the Single Bench order was stayed. Retaining the selection process means that the core area of that order has been upheld. Besides working as regular teachers instead of para teachers for a few months, I don’t think the irregular have any further reprieve from the court,” said Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, CPI-M leader and senior advocate.
TMC leader and senior advocate Kalyan Banerjee who represented the aggrieved teachers, however, claimed victory stating the stay would not have been given by the appeals court had the Single Bench order wasn’t illegal. “The court cannot terminate employment in this manner,” he stated.
The matter would come up for hearing next in August this year when the court reconvenes after its summer break.