Calcutta HC rejects govt appeal, bars ‘tainted' teachers from new exam
The West Bengal government and WBSSC filed a petition before the division bench of justices Soumen Sen and Smita Das De on Tuesday after a single bench of justice Saugata Bhattacharyya on Monday ordered WBSSC to bar identifiable tainted recruits from the 2016 panel.
The Supreme Court on April 3 cancelled the appointment of 25,752 school teachers and non-teaching staff (Group C and D) from the 2016 recruitment panel. On an appeal by the state, the top court on April 17 allowed non-tainted teachers to continue in service until December 31 but required them to appear for the fresh selection test. The notification for the test was published by WBSSC on May 30. However, it did not specify that only non-tainted teachers could appear for it.
According to the WBSSC, 1,801 teachers recruited from the 2016 panel were identified as tainted during the investigation in the bribe-for-job case, and 188 of them figure among the 2,60,000 applicants for the upcoming selection test.
The division bench said applications filed by the tainted teachers for the fresh test should be scrapped as ordered by the single bench.
Trinamool Congress Lok Sabha member and senior lawyer Kalyan Banerjee, who appeared for WBSSC, argued that it was a violation of Article 20(2) of the Constitution, which protects citizens from being punished twice for the same offence.
Banerjee said the alleged tainted teachers were being penalised a second time, as they had already lost their jobs following a Supreme Court order, and that the April 17 order did not specifically state that the tainted teachers could not appear for a fresh test.
'We have to obey the order. I cannot say anything against it right now. We repeatedly told the court that of the 0.26 million applicants for the fresh test, only 188 are identified as tainted,' Banerjee said.
Senior advocate Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, who represented the untainted teachers, said, 'The division bench dismissed the petitions the Trinamool Congress (TMC) government and the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) filed challenging the single bench order.'
Some shortlisted candidates from 2016, who also filed petitions before the bench of justice Bhattacharyya, alleged that WBSSC violated the 2016 recruitment rules by altering the weightage criteria for different components in the ongoing selection process. The commission has earmarked 10 marks each for 'prior teaching experience' and 'classroom demonstration'. This is a major deviation from the rules under which the 2016 tests were held, the petitioners said.
The petitioners moved the bench of justice Bhattacharyya alleging that tainted teachers were being given an opportunity to get their jobs back.
'It is unfortunate that we had to put up arguments in court despite the Supreme Court specifically saying that only the untainted recruits can sit for the examination. The sole intention of TMC was to derail the Supreme Court's direction because it wants to shield corruption,' Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, who is also a CPI(M) Rajya Sabha member, said.
No TMC leader commented on Thursday's order till evening.
Targeting the ruling party, Bengal BJP president Samik Bhattacharya, 'TMC has time and again used taxpayers' money on court cases so that it can protect the corrupt. It has lost each and every case.'
The alleged corruption hit the headlines in May 2022 when the High Court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the appointment of non-teaching staff (Group C and D) and teaching staff by WBSSC and the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education between 2014 and 2021, when TMC's Partha Chatterjee was education minister.
The Enforcement Directorate, which started a parallel probe, arrested Chatterjee in July 2022. The ED filed charges against him, ex-primary education board president and legislator Manik Bhattacharya, and 52 others in January this year.
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