The Supreme Court on Thursday recorded an undertaking from the West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) that it will upload within seven days the list of tainted teachers who lost their jobs following the concurrent judgments passed by Calcutta High Court and the apex court quashing the entire 2016 recruitment process of teachers as being vitiated following allegations of widespread corruption.

A fresh recruitment examination is now scheduled for September 7 and 14, but concerns abound that tainted candidates might participate in the new process.

A Supreme Court bench of Justice Sanjay Kumar and Justice Satish Chandra Sharma heard a special leave petition filed by Bejoy Biswas and other candidates, who argued that corrupt appointees should be barred from the upcoming recruitment.

An official of Bengal’s education department said that based on a CBI investigation, the SSC had in mid-February submitted to the Supreme Court that 5,303 candidates were allegedly appointed illegally as teaching and non-teaching staff in government-aided schools.

The official said the commission submitted the figure in an affidavit on February 15, five days after the Supreme Court completed hearing a writ petition filed by the state government challenging Calcutta High Court’s April 22, 2024, order scrapping the appointments of over 25,000 teaching and non-teaching staff following complaints of corruption in the recruitment process.

SSC officials said they would publish the list that had earlier been submitted to the Supreme Court.

The commission’s chairperson, Siddhartha Majumder, had said on February 27: “We have submitted to the Supreme Court a corrected figure based on the CBI probe.”

The commission’s submission says the number of people “identified having a dispute in OMR issue” stood at 4,091.

The number of persons identified “as tainted in the category of rank jumping and out of panel but appointed” stood at 1,212.

Sources in the commission said out of the 5,303 “tainted persons”, the number of “tainted” teachers was 1,803.

Contacted on Thursday, the SSC chairperson declined to comment. An SSC official said: “We are awaiting the written copy of the Supreme Court’s order.”

Court’s directive

Senior advocate Kalyan Bandyopadhyay, representing the SSC, assured the top court that the CBI report clearly distinguished between tainted and untainted candidates. “The CBI in a report to the SSC clearly demarcated who are tainted and who are untainted. The commission will publish the list accordingly...,” he said.

The Supreme Court recorded this undertaking. “The list of tainted candidates who were selected, whose selection has been set aside by the High Court and confirmed by this court, would be placed in the public domain, that is, on the website of the SSC within seven days,” the bench said.

Ongoing concerns

The petitioners, represented by senior advocate Maneka Guruswamy and advocate Abhijeet, highlighted a critical gap in the current process. They argued that while Calcutta High Court had directed the exclusion of tainted candidates from fresh recruitment, it failed to mandate the preparation of a comprehensive list to ensure their exclusion.

The special leave petition filed through advocate-on-record Siddhartha Sinha submitted that the “…High Court failed to appreciate that the tainted candidates, who are not eligible to apply for the 2nd SLST (State Level Selection Test) are still applying for the fresh recruitment and there is no mechanism to filter out the tainted and untainted candidates.”

Next steps

All petitioners who have submitted applications will be permitted to appear in examinations scheduled for September 7 and 14, without meeting the newly introduced eligibility criteria requiring 50 per cent minimum marks in graduation and post-graduation.

The Supreme Court has scheduled the next hearing for October 8.