The probe team at the district primary school council office in Jalpaiguri on Wednesday. (Biplab Basak)

Jalpaiguri, April 4: A three-member team from the school education department arrived here today to probe the allegations of nepotism in the recruitment of primary teachers in 2010.

The Trinamul Youth Congress and the Youth Congress had alleged that relatives of CPM leaders and officials of the district primary school council had been given preference over others in the recruitment process.

In 2009, over 12,000 candidates had written the qualifying exams and 6,500 of them were called for interviews. In July 2010, the school education department recruited 1,411 primary teachers.

But after a two-month agitation by the youth wings of Trinamul and Congress and submission of reports by an inquiry team, the Left Front government suspended 14 of the recruits for being “wrongly appointed” and issued showcause notices to 423 recruits.

The 423 newly appointed teachers had scored low marks in the written exams but high marks in the viva voce.

Deputy secretary of the school education department Abhijit Saha, inspector of schools Subir Kundu and additional secretary Tapan Pandit made up the team that arrived here today.

“We are going to carry out an investigation for the next two to three days and submit our findings to the secretary of the school education department. We are going through the official records, letters and the complaints filed in 2010,” Saha said.

Saha and the two other officials visited the office of the district primary school council here at noon and checked the details of the recruitment process.

The team will submit its report to the secretary of the school education department next week.

The president of block Youth Congress, Bubai Kar, said he had asked the officials to conduct an impartial probe.

“We pointed out that relatives of Manik Sanyal, the former district secretary of the CPM, as well as those of the former chairperson of the district primary school council, Mrinal Pal, were given jobs while many deserving candidates were deliberately ignored. We have demanded that the officials of the district primary school council who were directly involved in this unfair recruitment process be punished and those who got the jobs through by unfair means be sacked,” Kar said.

Secretary of the CPM-dominated All-Bengal Primary Teachers’ Association Bires Sikdar said the findings of an investigation that was carried out by the Left Front government in 2010 had not been made public yet.

“We want that the report put together by the former government be made public so that people get to know who were wrong,” Sikdar said.