The state government and the school service commission have filed separate review petitions before the Supreme Court, challenging the apex court’s April 3 order of en masse scrapping of jobs of 27,753 teaching and non-teaching staff, said sources in the education department.
The petitions, submitted on Saturday, are likely to be heard on May 8, said officials of the state education department.
The state government, in its petition, has told the Supreme Court that the removal of so many teachers from the schools has landed the education system in a crisis, sources in the department said.
“We have argued that when the Supreme Court has itself said in its April 3 order that it is not attaching any importance to the CBI’s report on recovering the scanned images of the OMR, then on what basis the jobs of so many teaching staff have been terminated,” said a source.
An official of the department said the apex court said in its April 3 order that the SSC argued that the entire selection process should not be annulled because the data available from the CBI, including the scanned mirror copies of the OMR sheets, “allows segregation of meritorious candidates from those appointed illegally”.
“But the same court said it may have accepted this argument if the SSC had the original physical OMR sheets or the mirror copy of the OMR sheets. The court noted the commission accepted that they did not have the physical OMR sheets, as they were destroyed. Further, the commission did not maintain the mirror copies of the OMR sheets in their computer/records,” the official said.
“If the court depended so much on separating the legally recruited ones from those appointed illegally on the SSC’s evidence, this means that the court did not find any merit in the CBI’s findings. In that case, on what basis the apex court arrived at this decision of termination,” the official added.
CBI gathered the mirror image (scanned images) from the three hard disks they had seized from the office Pankaj Bansal, an ex-employee of M/s Nysa Pvt Ltd in Ghaziabad.
The company was engaged by the commission to tabulate and scan the OMRs.
“The text of the April 3 order makes it clear that the court was not interested in any evidence retrieved from any third party. It would have been interested, had the same evidence been found in the possession of the SSC. This is going to be argued when the review petition comes up for hearing,” said sources in the department.
The SSC in its petition has argued that when the commission in its affidavit before the Supreme Court in mid February submitted that 5,353 teaching and non-teaching staff had been recruited through alleged illegalities, then why the apex court scrapped the jobs of 25,753 persons.
The Supreme Court, in its follow-up order on April 17, ruled that only 15,403 teachers who have been “found to be not specifically tainted” could go to schools till December 31 and draw salary till then.
This order came following a petition by the state secondary education board.
The number of teachers who have been barred from returning to schools stands at 1,804.
Calls and text messages from this newspaper to education minister Bratya Basu and SSC chairperson Siddhartha Majumdar on Sunday evening failed to elicit any response.
On Sunday, a delegation of the tainted teachers who have been barred from returning to schools went to chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s residence in Kalighat.
The delegation submitted a memorandum to the officials of the chief minister’s office.
“We told them when the Supreme Court rejected to accept the findings of the CBI, why we had been identified as tainted. We were told by the officials that the state government has already filed a review petition,” said Kamalesh Kapat, one of the tainted teachers.
