Cooch Behar, Oct. 12: Over 200 students of different private institutes that offer two-year Diploma in Elementary Education (D.El Ed) today took out a march here to protest the delay in publishing the results of their first-year examination and announcing the exam dates for the final year.

The protesters said because of the delay by the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE), they could not appear in the Teachers' Eligibility Test (TET), an exam that would be conducted by the state government to recruit teachers to primary schools across Bengal.

On October 9, the state school education department has issued a notification, mentioning that TET would be conducted to recruit around 30,000 teachers.

"All of us had enrolled in private institutes to obtain the D.El.Ed in 2015. Our session was supposed to end in 2017. These examinations are conducted by WBBPE. We appeared in the first year's exam in May this year. The results are yet to be published and there is no clue as to when the final year's exam will be conducted," said Somnath Sarkar, who is from Dhupguri in Jalpaiguri and studied at a primary teachers' training institute in Murshidabad, as he walked in the march.

That is why, the students said, they could not appear in the TET exams this year.

As per the notification, it is mandatory to have the diploma to apply for TET. It also says the application has to be made online, and the last date to apply for the exam is October 29.

"If we had got the mark sheets of the first year, we could have appeared in TET. The academic session is over and the institutes have, after conducting practical sessions and other necessary works as per the syllabus, have even released us. But we could not furnish our diploma due to the delay by WBBPE," said Tanushree Day, a girl from Cooch Behar.

After the march, the students went to the district magistrate's office and submitted a memorandum, seeking the intervention of the state government.

The chairman of WBBPE could not be contacted. Several calls made to Ratna Chakraborty Bagchi, the secretary of WBBPE, went unanswered.

Debabrata Nandi, one of the protesters, said: "It is disappointing that because of the delay by the primary education board, we are about to lose a chance to appear in TET. The state has announced quite a huge number of vacancies (around 30,000) but it is not clear whether, before the last date, we will receive the mark sheets."