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| Photo Credit: Sushanta Patronobish
The Calcutta High Court on July 16 raised questions over the recruitment of nearly 42,000 primary school teachers for State-run schools in 2016. The court sought details pertaining to the 2016 selection panel within 14 days from the West Bengal Board of Primary Education.
“The learned advocate representing the Board is directed to produce the [2016 teachers’ recruitment] panel before the Court, which, according to the Board, expired,” Justice Amrita Sinha directed on Tuesday.
Nearly 42,000 vacancies in State-run primary schools were filled in the recruitment process completed in 2016, based on the Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) conducted by the West Bengal Board of Primary Education in 2014. However, multiple aspirants complained of anomalies in the 2016 recruitment process. In April this year, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), in its report to the Calcutta High Court, pointed out irregularities in the recruitments based on the 2014 TET exam.
The Court has ordered the Board to set the next hearing date for this case on July 30, before which the Board has been directed to submit to the court details on the appointments of 42,000 teachers of Classes 1 to 5 in State-run schools.
“The petitioners seek a direction upon the board of primary education for publication of the merit list in terms of Rule 8(5) of the West Bengal Primary School Teachers’ Recruitment Rules, 2016,” the Calcutta High Court said in its order on Tuesday.
The petitioners, whose pleas were being heard by Justice Sinha on Tuesday, had undergone the recruitment process in 2016.
In a related development, a CBI team seized multiple servers and hard disks from the office of M/s. S Basu Roy and Co. in Kolkata’s Southern Avenue area on July 12, in its search for digital back-ups of the optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets of the 2014 TET examination. The search followed the Calcutta High Court’s order last week, directing the CBI to retrieve storage devices containing scanned OMR sheets from the 2014 TET exam.