School job loss: 'Eligible' teachers plan to spread movement outside West Bengal

KOLKATA: A section of 'Eligible' teachers, rendered jobless following the Supreme Court order, are mulling over future steps to broad base their agitation from West Bengal to outside the state, especially Delhi.

A spokesperson of 'Jogyo Sikshak Adhikar Manch' (Platform of Eligible Teachers), Sujoy Ghosh, on Sunday said they should not be victimised for the fault of others. Over 25,000 teaching and non-teaching staff of state-sponsored and -aided schools lost their jobs after the apex court on April 3 found large-scale irregularities in the 2016 recruitment process and scrapped the entire panel.

The jobless people claimed that the reason behind their plight was the inability of the School Service Commission (SSC), which appointed them, to differentiate between the candidates who secured employment through fraudulent means and those who did not.

The “deserving” teachers have been agitating in the state demanding that the West Bengal government and the SSC find out a mechanism so that they could be back in service. They have been on a sit-in for the past few days.

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The spokesperson of the platform said they are seeking the opinions of "stakeholders and sympathisers" about the future roadmap of the agitation and taking the movement outside West Bengal, especially Delhi.

"Our only demand is that not a single deserving teaching and non-teaching employee be victimised for the fault of tainted candidates and the SSC,” Ghosh said. The protestors also kept a drop box at their sit-in venue at Esplanade seeking opinions of other teachers, non-teaching employees and members of the public on the issue.

Meanwhile the CPI(M)-influenced All Bengal Teachers Association (ABTA) called for a rally to SSC headquarters 'Acharya Bhavan' in Salt Lake on April 17 demanding appropriate steps by the state government urgently to save jobs of the deserving teachers, punishment of those involved in the corruption and transparency in filling up vacant posts.