While extending the stay on recruitment of teachers at the upper primary level on Friday, Calcutta High Court (coram: Abhijit Ganguly, J) has advanced a searing indictment of the West Bengal School Service Commission, lampooning the entity as worthless, one “whose officers should immediately be removed”. The court has moved ahead from the interim stay that it had directed last Wednesday. Not to put too fine a point on it, the Bench has reduced the SSC to irrelevance. And yet from one dispensation to another, it continues to be the overarching authority in the matter of recruiting school teachers.

It reflects poorly on the functioning of the SSC that it has been directed to upload on its website a merit list with marks against the name of each candidate. Central to the raging controversy must be the manipulative marking, allegedly to favour the ruling party’s footsoldiers. “Why was the order of the court passed in 2019 not carried out by the commission?” the Bench asked.

“The court has framed guidelines for selection of candidates and preparing a list on its basis.” The indictment and the very system of evaluation have
suffered a stinging reprisal with the observation ~ “The court feels there is lack of transparency and there are irregularities in drawing up the merit list.”

The court did not concur with the argument of the secretary, school education department, that successive legal tangles had been holding up the appointment of hundreds of thousands of school teachers.

It bears recall that on 3 October 2019, the Bench had instructed SSC to prepare the merit list on the basis of the candidate’s performance in the Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET), his or her academic eligibility, and success in B.Ed or D.Led (diploma in elementary education training). Quashed on 11 December 2020 was the SSC’s process to recruit teachers to fill 15,000 vacancies.

The commission was directed to start the recruitment process on the basis of the guidelines framed by the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE). It stipulated that candidates with a B.Ed degree should be accorded “first preference”.

Going by the terms of engagement formulated last December, the merit list was scheduled to be prepared by May 31. Three petitions were filed on June 24, mentioning gross irregularities and seeking a stay on the process of recruitment. Suspicions that the School Service Commission tends to follow the dictates of its political masters are not wholly unfounded.

In the net, recruitment of teachers has hit the reefs once again. While adults play footsie, it is the taught who are the worst sufferers of this imbroglio. The children deserve better at a vital stage of learning, specifically the upper primary level or, in a sense, the transition stage. Far from it. The School Service Commission’s process of recruitment wallows in the mire of irregularities and worse. More’s the pity.