This morning the West Bengal government appealed to the Indian Supreme Court after the Calcutta High Court decided to cancel the appointments of all school staff selected through a public competition in 2016. There are over 24 thousand people, including teachers and non-teachers, who risk finding themselves suddenly without work.
At the beginning of the week, in fact, the local court declared the selection process conducted in 2016 null and void, ordering the School Service Commission – the committee that deals with the recruitment of teachers – to make new hires within the next 15 days and giving instructions to the teachers to return the salary received so far within six weeks and with interest.
The West Bengal government had announced in 2014 its intention to recruit public school staff through competition. But when the State Level Selection Test took place, several candidates, having finished the exam, reported a series of irregularities, such as, for example, people with low scores who found themselves at the top of the ranking or even candidates who had not passed the competition who then received the letter of appointment.
The case hit the headlines for the first time in July 2022, when the former Education Minister of West Bengal, Partha Chatterjee, who before joining the Trinamool Congress, the party led by chief minister Mamata Banerjee, was arrested , was part of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the coalition of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Chatterjee is suspected, together with others, of having received money from people who were then hired fraudulently: during the investigations the Enforcement Directorate, the Indian government agency that deals with financial fraud, seized several million rupees and jewels, found in the residence of one of Chatterjee’s closest associates. Several properties and lands worth hundreds of millions of rupees were also confiscated by the ED.
In a second related case, the School Service Commission is accused of hiring primary school teachers who failed the suitability test. Local media write that after the competition the Calcutta High Court had received around 500 petitions denouncing the corruption of the state commission. According to some testimonies, some of the candidates during the selection had only written their personal data and the rest left the exam paper blank. An advisor to the School Service Commission and an alleged middleman were arrested earlier this month and are currently in judicial custody.
According to commentators, the case risks having negative repercussions on the local administration, and in particular on the chief minister Mamata Banerjee, who has so far declared that the teachers excluded from the profession due to the Court’s ruling will receive support (it is not clear whether it is also economic) from part of the state: “We will support those who have lost their jobs,” said the Trinamool Congress leader, adding that the BJP, which is hoping for a victory in the current elections, has influenced the judiciary and the outcome of the sentences.
