Kolkata heat taking a toll on teachers' protest in front of SSC office?

Although their demands have yet to be officially fulfilled, the number of protesters outside the West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) has significantly reduced. 

 

Jobless teachers and education workers have been staging a sit-in protest in front of the SSC office since Monday. They started their protest demanding that a list distinguishing the tainted and untainted candidates and mirror images of OMR sheets of all candidates of the 2016 SSC panel be made public. This panel has been annulled by both the Calcutta High Court and the Supreme Court.

 

Even though it was not made public, the West Bengal government had initially compiled a list of 17,206 teachers who were not identified as “ineligible” or “tainted,” which was later submitted to the Supreme Court by the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE). However, on Wednesday, the board removed 1,803 names from the list after identifying various discrepancies.

 

Following the revision, the board started sending names of teachers who return to work and receive their salaries till December 31, 2025, until new appointments are made, as directed by the Supreme Court last week. As a result, many of these teachers began returning to their schools starting Thursday.

 

Additionally, the 40-degree Kolkata heat has also forced many to withdraw from the SSC office. Many have fallen sick during the course of their protest. Representatives of the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front, the organisation leading the protest during the RG Kar movement, ran a medical camp on Wednesday at the protest site. 

 

However, the teachers refuse to believe that this is the end of their movement. During the course of their protest, they also demanded that those whose names were not put on the list of untainted or ineligible must be identified.

 

West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Monday had directed the protesting teachers to get back to work and not bother about who is tainted and who is not. “The state government is there to worry about it. The court is there,” she said from Paschim Medinipur.

 

“You don’t need the list. You have a job and you need to see whether that job is there or not. You need to see whether you are getting your salary or not.”

 

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court had instructed the state to recover salaries from the tainted candidates. The government is yet to initiate the process of salary recovery. A contempt petition was filed at the Calcutta High Court as well related to the matter.

 

On Monday, the SSC faced questions over not complying with the Supreme Court's directive. But during Wednesday’s hearing at the division bench of Justices Debangsu Basak and Justice Mohammad Shabbar Rashidi, the Education Department and SSC counsels offered no update on salary recovery. Instead, they questioned the High Court's authority to hear a contempt case.

 

India