WB School Recruitment Scam: CPI(ML) Liberation leader seeks President's intervention

NEW DELHI: Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya has written to President Droupadi Murmu over the Supreme Court's decision to terminate nearly 26,000 teachers in West Bengal, urging her intervention to save the teachers. In a letter, a copy of which he shared on social media, Bhattacharya said the termination was a "collective punishment" for the systemic corruption in the recruitment process.

"The court and the government all accepted that the overwhelming majority of teachers now terminated had obtained their jobs by fair means, but now all of the 26,000 teachers who had to go through the tainted recruitment process have been stripped of their only source of secure and dignified living," Bhattacharya said.

"It means a traumatic disruption in the lives of thousands of families for absolutely no fault of their own. It also means utter chaos for countless students and a huge blow to the state-run public education system which has already been weakened over the years through chronic neglect and systematic privatisation of education, being pushed most particularly through the new education policy," he said.

Call for urgent intervention

The CPI(ML) leader said the rise of an education and examination mafia, and the proliferation of paper leaks and recruitment scams, is a matter of concern. "No justice has been done in a whole series of scams in the last one decade beginning with the Vyapam scam in Madhya Pradesh where whistleblowers and witnesses have had to pay with their lives and perpetrators got away with impunity to the more recent NEET and UPSC scams," he said.

Bhattacharya said termination cannot be an answer to systematic corruption and administrative failure. "We appeal to you to intervene urgently and find a way out to save the victimised teachers, their families and dependents, and help reform the beleaguered system of education, examination and recruitment without victimising the victims," he urged the President.

The Supreme Court last week invalidated the appointment of 25,753 teachers and staffers in state-run and aided schools, terming the entire selection process "vitiated and tainted," upholding the Calcutta High Court's 2024 verdict in the matter. With the Supreme Court verdict causing widespread discontent, the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE) has moved the top court seeking 'modification' in its order.