A high court bench extended the stay on an order passed by former judge Abhijit Gangopadhyay disallowing the appointment of physical and work education teachers in secondary schools by creating supernumerary posts.

The former judge had stayed the appointments in 2022 and raised questions about their legality. In 2023, a division bench headed by Justice Harish Tandon imposed a stay on the application of the order till February 28 this year.

Justice Biswajit Basu on Wednesday extended the stay till June 18, when the case will be heard next.

The school service commission had planned to appoint physical and work education teachers from a panel of the wait-listed candidates based on a cabinet decision to create supernumerary posts in May 2022.

Gangopadhyay (now a BJP Lok Sabha MP from Tamluk) had passed an order in November 2022, raising questions about the legality of the decision approved by the cabinet.

A petition was moved before Justice Basu demanding an order to vacate the stay on Gangopadhyay’s order.

The petition first came up for hearing on April 5 this year, days after the SSC recommended the appointments of 1,240 candidates as physical and work education teachers in supernumerary posts.

SSC’s recommendation came a day after the Supreme Court set aside a Calcutta High Court division bench directive for a CBI inquiry into the Bengal government’s decision to create supernumerary posts for 6,861 teaching and non-teaching staff in 2022.

Sudipto Dasgupta, a lawyer representing the petitioners, said: “The chief minister decided to appoint work and physical education teachers from the pool of the wait-listed candidates even as the panel expired in 2019. If her government had to make additional recruitments, then the government should have held fresh recruitment tests.”

Sources in the education department said 1,500 physical and work education teachers had been appointed by 2019.

“Several wait-listed candidates said in an appeal to the state government that they wouldn’t get a chance to be hired as their age limit would expire by the time the next recruitment phase arrived. Hence, the state government created extra posts so they could be appointed,” said an education department official.

The age limit for general category candidates for the post is 37 years. These wait-listed candidates, who took the test in 2017, were counselled in November 2022.

Their names could not be recommended as a case had been filed in the Calcutta High Court challenging the aim of creating the supernumerary posts.