The high court has asked the state primary education board to file an affidavit stating the reason behind the delay in publishing the TET 2023 (Teachers’ Eligibility Test) results. The report must be filed within three weeks.

Justice Biswajit Basu gave the interim order following a prayer by some candidates who had written the test.

Appearing for the petitioners, advocate Sudipta Dasgupta said on Wednesday: “The TET exam was held on December 24, 2023. But the board has yet to publish the results. As a result, my clients are deprived of the chance to participate in the recruitment process.”

The board said a pending court case had stalled the publication of results.

“A division bench of this court had ordered the scrapping of five lakh OBC certificates issued by the Bengal government after 2010... That case is now being heard in the Supreme Court. So, the board has not been able to publish the results,” the board’s lawyer said.

On May 22, 2024, a Calcutta High Court division bench passed an order calling the OBC certificates “invalid”.

“Since the certificates have been declared invalid, how can we determine the OBC candidate? We are looking forward to the Supreme Court verdict,” Gautam Paul, the president of the primary board, told Metro.

Within hours of the May 22 verdict, chief minister Mamata Banerjee had said she would not accept the judgment.

TET is one of the screening layers and qualifying TET does not guarantee one the job of a teacher in government-aided primary schools (Class I to IV).

Advocate Dasgupta, however, pointed out: “The apex court had not issued any stay on publication of results.”

Dasgupta later told Metro that while delivering the order last year, the high court had stated that those who had already submitted their OBC certificates while applying for various recruitment exams would stay outside the ambit of the May 22 order.

After hearing both sides, Justice Biswajit Basu issued the interim order and fixed the matter for hearing after three weeks.

The interim order was issued a day after the board said it “was not in a position to publish the notification regarding recruitment of the primary teachers” in government-aided schools because of the ongoing litigation related to OBC reservation in the Supreme Court.

The board’s secretary issued the notification on Tuesday. In November, the board announced that they would issue the recruitment notification once they received the details of the vacancies in schools.

Tuesday’s notification said owing to the ongoing litigation the directorate of school education could not give the board a “category-wise vacancy list”.

The board did not conduct TET last year because the result of the TET 2023 was not published.