The high court has struck down a petition that sought to restrict the upcoming recruitment test to only the positions advertised by the West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) in 2016.

The petition also requested a separate recruitment test to fill the additional vacant
positions.

On Wednesday, Justice Soumen Sen and Justice Smita Das De in their order said that a separate test would delay the process.

The written order says: “By reason of passage of time, the number of vacancies have increased and every day courts are confronted with large number of cases where vacancies could not be filled up due to pendency of the litigations.... It is high time that all the vacancies are filled up if required by clubbing the vacancies, as the separate recruitment process for vacancies declared in 2016 and beyond would cause serious inconvenience and delay in filling up the existing vacancies.”

“It would also affect the state exchequer,” the order says.

The order says the court is concerned about the appointment of quality teachers through a competitive examination to fill all existing vacancies. “We have come across cases where the pupil-teacher ratio is abnormally high and due to non-filling up
of vacancies, the students are suffering,” says the written order.

Senior advocate Kalyan Bandyopadhyay, representing the commission, said that the state government would appoint 35,267 teachers through the recruitment test scheduled to be held in the first week of September.

The already poor pupil-teacher ratio that the court referred to has been hit further by the Supreme Court’s April 3 decision to terminate the jobs of 17,206 teachers working at the secondary and higher secondary levels of government-aided schools. The court called the entire 2016 selection “vitiated” and “tainted beyond redemption”.

Following a prayer by the state secondary education board, the apex court modified its order on April 17.

The court ordered that 15,403 teachers, identified as not specifically tainted, can continue their jobs till December 31 and participate in the fresh recruitment process to retain them beyond the deadline.

Firdaus Shamim, one of the lawyers representing the petitioners demanding that the commission be asked to conduct the tests only for those who had lost jobs following the April 3 sack order, argued that the vacancies created after 2016 should be filled up through a separate exercise.

An education department official said the vacancies in teaching positions have increased manifold as the SSC could not hold any recruitment exercise after 2016 because of a barrage of court cases alleging irregularities in the recruitments based on the 2016 selection process.

The court order says there cannot be any greater concern for the court than the academic interest of the students, and the court accepts the “submission of the advocate-general and Kalyan Bandyopadhyay, senior advocate, for laying down the criterion and justification for increasing the number of vacancies.”

“Moreover, in our respectful reading, there is no restriction on the board (secondary education board) or the commission to fix the number of vacancies.... It is the prerogative of the executive to decide how many appointments shall be made,” the order says.