The schoolteachers who have returned to work after the end of the summer vacation on June 2 are taking turns to keep their protest alive in Salt Lake’s Central Park, opposite Bikash Bhavan, the education secretariat.

The members of the Deserving Teachers Rights Forum are on the site of their protest on a rotational basis.

Mehboob Mandal, a leader of the platform, said they have divided the protesting teachers into several groups so that they could take turns and keep the protest alive.

“It is not possible to be present in large numbers at the platform as classes have resumed. But skeletal strength will always be present. We cannot allow the protest to die down,” said Mehboob Mandal.

The protest started on May 7 outside Bikash Bhavan.

The members of the forum, who have been marked as not specifically tainted and allowed to return to school till December, are still opposed to writing fresh selection tests for which the school service commission came up with a recruitment notification on May 30.

The sit-in, whose base has since been shifted to Central Park from Bikash Bhavan following a court order, is being held as the teachers do not want to write the tests to retain their jobs beyond December. They want to be reinstated without having to undergo any fresh selection.

“We don’t want to write a fresh selection test because we believe we got the job fairly and cannot be punished because of the illegality committed by the state government in the appointment of a few. We are all looking forward to the review petition that the state government has filed on our termination by the Supreme Court on April 3,” said Brindaban Ghosh, a spokesperson of the platform.

The Bengal government’s petition to the Supreme Court for a review of its April 3 order that en masse terminated school staff says the court failed to appreciate that over 18,000 candidates “not specifically found tainted” have also been made to suffer “for the alleged illegality committed by the SSC in the selection process in respect of certain other tainted candidates”.

The government’s petition filed in mid-May says that though the apex court identified candidates whose selection process was tainted and “whose appointments alone could have been cancelled”, the court cancelled the “appointments of even such candidates which were not specifically found tainted”.

Although the Supreme Court in its modified order on April 17 allowed 15,403 “not specifically found tainted” teachers to return to schools till December 31 and work till then, the relaxation does not give them relief beyond that, the teachers said.

“As we have returned to school after the summer vacation, we are not feeling comfortable because of the feeling that we are destined to lose our jobs. Many of us are failing to conduct classes freely. We must protest this harassment,” said Ghosh, who teaches at a school in Murshidabad.

“Is it possible for us to prepare for the fresh tests after taking classes?”