Kolkata, Nov 24 (PTI) On a day the West Bengal School Service Commission is set to publish the SLST results for recruitment of teachers for classes 9-10, two groups of job aspirants on Monday held separate rallies in the city over “illegal” mark allotment and recruitment delays, highlighting persisting unrest in the school education sector.
Thousands of fresh SSC aspirants for classes 11 and 12 blocked the arterial Dorina Crossing in Esplanade area for around 40 minutes before police intervened and removed them.
The protestors, who rallied from the Sealdah station in north Kolkata, breached multiple police barricades and clashed with personnel in uniform to reach Esplanade.
Trouble began after police denied permission to the protesters to follow their planned route to the Y-channel in Esplanade and attempted to divert them to Ramleela Maidan on CIT Road. The agitators refused to accept the alternative route and squatted at the JL Nehru Road–SN Banerjee Road intersection.
Officers then physically lifted several demonstrators into waiting vehicles and shifted them behind a barricaded enclosure to clear the road after nearly 40 minutes.
The new aspirants demanded scrapping of the 10 ‘experience’ marks granted to previously appointed teachers whose panel was cancelled by the court in the school jobs scam, public display of all OMR sheets, and creation of one lakh additional teaching posts.
“We will continue our agitation against the unlawful 10 marks. We worked day and night doing tuition to pay for the exam application fee, and now we are not eligible despite securing full marks,” a protester said.
Sangeeta Roy, a job aspirant from Bally, said, “We will not allow this disparity. Why should the over 12,000 teachers—who lost their jobs following the Supreme Court order on April 3—be given 10 grace marks in the September 14 written test, in which we too got full marks? This is another scam. We demand immediate scrapping of the 10 marks. We will not leave the road till our demands are met.” The provision of 10 extra marks for experience to former teachers whose appointments were annulled has emerged as a major point of contention among new candidates and has been challenged before both the Supreme Court as well as the Calcutta High Court.
In a separate mobilisation, hundreds of candidates from the 2016 Upper Primary batch marched from the Karunamoyee crossing in Salt Lake to Bikash Bhaban, the state education department headquarters, demanding completion of the long-pending appointment process.
Though results were declared nearly a decade ago and a court had directed recruitment of 14,052 candidates, appointments of 1,241 qualified aspirants remain stalled despite completing all formalities, including interviews, the protesters alleged, while holding a sit-in near Central Park in Salt Lake.
The protesters claimed that counselling — the final step before appointment — had not been conducted despite a Supreme Court-upheld directive that set November 20 as the deadline.
“It is contempt of the Supreme Court order. Despite the deadline, we are being pushed back and forth between authorities. The chairman asks us to go to Bikash Bhavan for vacancy matching, and officials there direct us back to the chairman,” a protester said. PTI BSM SMY SUS BDC MNB
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