The state government will seek legal opinion on the future of the sacked non-teaching (Group C and D) school staff, education minister Bratya Basu said on Friday.

A delegation of the dismissed non-teaching staff met Basu at Trinamool Bhavan, alleging discrimination against them in the state secondary education board’s submission in the Supreme Court.

On Thursday, the top court gave relief to the sacked but “not found specifically tainted” teachers, allowing them to continue teaching till December 31, by when a fresh recruitment process must be completed. But no such relief was granted to the non-teaching staff.

“We will seek legal opinion on the fate of Group C and D employees. Then, we will decide on our course of action,” Basu told reporters after the meeting. He said the same thing during the meeting, said members of the delegation.

At the meeting, the non- teaching staff alleged that during the oral submission, the state’s counsel only pleaded for teachers and did not mention anything about the non-teaching staff.

“Why this discrimination? We were expecting the state government and the state board for secondary education to speak for all sacked but untainted employees as a unit. But they made a distinction between the teachers and non-teaching staff,” said Sujoy Sardar, a sacked non-teaching employee, after Friday’s meeting. He had attended the hearing on Thursday.

“During the hearing, I went up to Ramanuj Ganguly (president of the secondary education board) and urged him to tell the counsel to push our case. But he did not respond,” said Sardar.

Sardar was part of the delegation that met Basu at Trinamool Bhavan off EM Bypass, near the Metropolitan intersection. The meeting started around 5pm and continued for close to three hours.

Calls to Ganguly from The Telegraph on Friday evening went unanswered.

On Thursday, a bench of Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar declined any relief to the dismissed non-teaching staff.

The apex court judges said the number of tainted candidates was “substantially high” among the non-teaching staff and explained that their order mainly aimed to ensure that the pupils did not suffer from a teacher shortage.

The state government and the school board had moved applications saying the sudden removal of thousands of employees would cripple the school education system.

Members of the delegation said that the minister had assured them that the state and the secondary education board will seek another
clarification from the court on the future of the non-teaching staff who “are not found
tainted”.

Several non-teaching employees said they were shocked by the alleged bias on the part of the state.

“The April 3 order treated all the untainted teachers and non-teaching staff equally. There was no discrimination. Then what happened in a fortnight? Like the teachers, we, too, have to take care of our families. We, too, have children and elderly parents. We, too, have EMIs to pay,” said Moumita Biswas, another dismissed non-teaching staff who was at Friday’s meeting.

On April 3, the apex court had cancelled en masse the appointments of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching school staff recruited through the 2016 selection process, saying the entire process had been “vitiated”. The teachers, all of them holding the post of assistant teacher, had been appointed for Classes IX to XII.

Another dismissed non-teaching employee said the Thursday order cleared the way for the disbursal of salaries to the teachers. “But we were left in the lurch. We don’t know how we will get our salaries,” he said.