Teachers barred from returning to school met education minister Bratya Basu at Bikash Bhavan on Friday. The teachers demanded they be allowed to go to school and draw salaries till December 31, along the lines of the temporary relief extended to those “not specifically found tainted”.

Education department sources said Basu heard the teachers out and asked them to meet him again on Monday. Calls and text messages to Basu went unanswered on Friday evening.

A department official said a delegation of four sacked teachers met Basu and asked him on what basis they had been excluded from the list of segregated teachers allowed to return to school, since the Supreme Court had refused to take cognisance of the CBI’s report.

The school service commission has excluded 1,804 teachers from a pool of 17,206 teachers, after the apex court on April 17 ruled on a plea by the state secondary board that only those “not found specifically tainted” could go back to school till December.

SSC chairperson Siddhartha Majumdar was at Friday’s meeting.

Kamalesh Kapat, a delegation member, said: “We told the minister that we could not figure out why we have been categorised as tainted. The CBI has mentioned that our case comes under the OMR dispute category. But the Supreme Court in its April 3 order has not taken cognisance of the CBI report. Then why have we been stopped from returning to school? Why has our salary been stopped?”

Another teacher of the delegation said the apex court’s April 3 order said the SSC argued that the selection process should not be annulled because the data retrieved from the CBI, including scanned mirror copies of OMR sheets, “allows segregation of candidates”.

The teacher said: “We told the minister that the same court said in its April 3 order they may have accepted this argument if the SSC had the original physical OMRs or mirror copies. This means the court did not give credence to the scanned images retrieved by the CBI. Then, why have we been identified as tainted?”

A department official said Basu told the delegation the state government would soon file a review petition against the April 3 order.

The teachers said they would continue their sit-in outside the SSC office in Salt Lake till their demands are met.