Kolkata: Around 100 teaching job aspirants, who are among those who lost their employment after a Supreme Court order, on Tuesday took to the streets near the state education department headquarters for the second day, protesting non-inclusion of their names in the list of interviewees.
The School Service Commission held a recruitment examination on September 14 after the Supreme Court invalidated SSC’s 2016 panel in April, annulling the jobs of nearly 26,000 teaching and non-teaching staff in state-run and -aided institutions after finding that the selection process was tainted.
The SSC on November 15 published a list of 20,500 candidates who would be interviewed to fill up vacancies for classes 11 and 12 in state-run state-aided schools.
One of the protestors, ‘Deserving Teachers Rights Forum’ spokesperson Chinmoy Mondal, led the rally from Karunamoyee bus stand to the education department headquarters Bikash Bhavan in Salt Lake, where they were stopped and taken away by the police in vehicles.
Mondal, who was among the ‘untainted’ teachers of the 2016 SSC panel and allowed to sit for the recruitment test, had qualified in the written exam, but his name did not figure in the list of 20,500 candidates called for interview.
‘Untainted’ candidates are those whose involvement in the irregularities in the 2016 recruitment process was not proved.
“What will we do now? The chief minister had assured the untainted teachers not to lose heart. She had talked about Plan A, B or C for the teachers who got jobs by merit in the 2016 SSC test. She said the government will do the needful. We came to meet the education minister or a senior official of the department. But the police are taking us away,” Mondal said.
Another group of people, who wrote the exam for the first time in 2025 and qualified in written tests but did not get call for interviews “despite scoring high marks”, tried to stage a sit-in before the SSC headquarters, about one km away from Bikash Bhavan, and were chased away by the police.
“We demand an audience with the CM or the education minister to know why we were not selected for the interview. We want to know why some tainted teachers were called for the interview and given 10 marks extra. We scored 100 per cent marks in the written test and are still being discriminated against,” Debjani Barik, a protesting first-time candidate, said.
An SSC official said that the list of candidates who got the call for verification was prepared following the guideline that says 10 marks will be given for teaching experience, while 20 marks are for the interview.
On Monday, a similar protest by the first-time SSC candidates continued for nearly six hours to press for the same demand.
Education Minister Bratya Basu said the SSC is conducting recruitment tests monitored by the Supreme Court, and the rules cannot be changed.
He had also said that the chief minister and the department will think about increasing the number of vacancies and posts after discussions with experts and examining the legal aspects.
