Kolkata: This week, the Supreme Court delivered a scathing condemnation of deep-rooted institutional decay in West Bengal, declaring the state’s 2016 School Service Commission (SSC) recruitment drive as “vitiated and tainted beyond resolution” by “large-scale manipulation and fraud.” The verdict, annulling 25,752 appointments made by the government, exposed a complex web of corruption orchestrated by the ruling party’s top brass and middlemen. Yet, behind the headline lies the raw human cost – thousands of qualified candidates, stripped of jobs, now face uncertainty and at worst, unemployment.Although the Supreme Court verdict has relaxed re-examination rules for those “untainted,” by the corruption in 2016, this assurance is not good enough for Anurupa Banerjee, whose 10-year teaching career at Kulti Government Colony Refugee Girls High School, near Kolkata, ended abruptly with the court verdict. Banerjee had got near-perfect scores in the SSC examinations that led to her appointment. She is her family’s sole earner and learned of her dismissal while on invigilation duty. “We lost our job despite our eligibility. We are victims of politics,” she told The Wire. “I still can’t believe I have lost my job. I can’t even process it now. Everything looks blurred. My father is a heart patient. I don’t know what I will do.” Amaresh Sikdar of nearby Dhosa Chandaneshwar is similarly distraught. “I quit my primary school teaching job to clear the higher secondary teacher recruitment exam and secure this position. The court repeatedly asked the government to separate genuine from fake candidates. What shocks me is that despite proven corruption in recruitment, the state did nothing for a year except obliterate proof!” said Sikdar.Police and security personnel detain an Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) activist during a protest against the Trinamool Congress-led state government in the teacher recruitment scam, in Kolkata, West Bengal, Friday, April 4, 2025. Photo: PTI.‘Nobel for lawyer’The verdict is a setback for the Mamata Banerjee government. Soon after the order, the chief minister held a high-level meeting with the state education minister Bratya Basu and senior bureaucrats. In a press conference, she blamed the Communist party of India (Marxist) and the Bhartiya Janata Party for orchestrating the verdict. “We have the highest regard for the judiciary, but… I cannot accept this judgment. One Chief Justice of India (CJI) stayed (the Calcutta high court verdict) and another Chief Justice cancelled it. Now you can understand what I want to say,” said Banerjee. “If money is found at a sitting judge’s home, they are transferred. So, why weren’t these candidates simply transferred?”Despite claiming “respect” for the courts, Banerjee dismissed the verdict as “inhuman,” and sarcastically said the petitioning lawyer – CPI(M) leader and advocate Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya – deserved a Nobel Prize.She provided no clarification as to whether she would publish a list of “tainted” appointees – this has long been claimed as a move that could have protected genuine candidates. The opposition and teachers who have lost their jobs have noted how the government created supernumerary posts, shielding cronies at the expense of honest job-seekers. “West Bengal government and chief minister Mamata Banerjee are responsible for the job loss of 25000 people. Supernumerary posts were created to accommodate those who had got jobs using unfair means. The chief minister and her cabinet should be behind bars,” said BJP MLA and leader of the opposition in the Bengal assembly, Suvendu Adhikari. An employee of a West Bengal government school reacts after the Supreme Court upheld the Calcutta High Court’s verdict invalidating the appointment of 25,753 teachers and other staff in state-run and state-aided schools in West Bengal, in Kolkata, Thursday, April 3, 2025. Photo: PTI.Adhikari was incidentally part of the Mamata Banerjee cabinet when the scam took place in 2016. At that time, he was largely believed to have been Banerjee’s second-in-command. Two senior BJP leaders, including Adhikari’s younger brother, are named in the CBI chargesheet related to the scandal. Adhikari also oversaw TMC organisational matters in eight districts, including Purba Medinipur, Murshidabad, and Uttar Dinajpur – areas with the maximum number of tainted appointments.A blow for education tooThe impact of the scam is starkly evident in schools across West Bengal. In Murshidabad’s Bhangwangola High School, 21 out of 62 teachers have been dismissed. Down south, all six teachers at Herambha Gopalpur Sanatan Milan Vidyapith in the Pahar Pratima Bloch in Sundarbans have lost their jobs, leaving students in a precarious situation. In Canning, a town in the South 24 Parganas, a teacher has attempted to take his life since the verdict.Many schools statewide will now face critical shortages of subject teachers. The Supreme Court’s verdict threatens to severely cripple the already struggling government-run education system in the state.In 2023, the apex court stayed the Calcutta high court order mandating fresh recruitment for 32,000 primary teachers due to the “school jobs for cash” scandal. The potential repercussions of the present verdict on that primary recruitment case are expected to further complicate the matter. Twelve separate cases related to recruitment corruption are currently underway at the Calcutta high court.“We’ve repeatedly said Trinamool has systematically destroyed the state’s education system. This scam has ruined nearly a lakh families. The court repeatedly asked to separate genuine from fake appointees, but the government spent a year destroying evidence instead,” asked CPI(M) state secretary Mohammed Salim.“What action is taken against job sellers? Those who secured bail after selling jobs are being garlanded by the government. Why should deserving candidates suffer for Trinamool’s crimes?” Salim added.Employees of West Bengal government schools react after the Supreme Court upheld the Calcutta High Court’s verdict invalidating the appointment of 25,753 teachers and other staff in state-run and state-aided schools in West Bengal, in Kolkata, Thursday, April 3, 2025. Photo: PTI.Contrary to Banerjee’s assertions, past actions demonstrate a disturbing pattern of rewarding TMC leaders implicated in corruption. A case in point is the 2022 Calcutta high court dismissal of former minister of state for education Paresh Chandra Adhikari’s daughter, Ankita, from her teaching position in a government-aided school in the same scam. Despite scoring lower than qualifying marks in the 2016 selection test, Ankita was appointed as a senior teacher. Last year, she was appointed as the district secretary of TMC in Cooch Behar.Deep-seated corruption“Corruption has been institutionalised in this state by Trinamool. To cover up this graft, the government is using taxpayers’ money to fight court cases. This is a corrupt regime,” said former MP and Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Choudhury. The state unit of the Congress has demanded the chief minister’s resignation.The court scrutiny revealed a chilling conspiracy. The SSC outsourced the scanning and marking of Optical Mark Recognition or OMR sheets to a company which then subcontracted the work to another one. Original OMR sheets were destroyed within a year, as per SSC rules, leaving only the scanned copies. CBI investigations exposed mismatches between SSC’s server data and files recovered from an employee of the vendor, proving “marks were inflated to qualify undeserving candidates.” “How many are corrupt? Who are they? Why isn’t the honourable court demanding ruthless punishment for them? Now, here I am grading higher secondary exam papers – what am I supposed to do after this? Let the government answer that!” asked another teacher who has lost his job, Arijit Saha, from the South 24 Parganas.The chief minister’s sudden gesture to meet job scam victims on April 7 starkly contrasts with her four-year silence toward protesters who cleared the 2016 exams but were denied jobs due to the same scam. Her pledge to fill vacant positions offers little comfort to those who for years protested near her residence, only to be met with police batons, imprisonment, and indifference. An ongoing protest by those who gave the 2017 Group-D WBGDRB examination. Photo: Joydeep Sarkar.“It’s a shame on the state government. There is no doubt that a section of the 25,000 teachers had to pay to get an appointment letter and most may not have qualified. The CJI repeatedly asked the state government to segregate the duly passed and the questionable teachers but the state did not. Hence the state is responsible for the misery of those who qualified properly but will be dismissed,” said former TMC MP Jawhar Sircar, who resigned from Rajya Sabha during the R.G. Kar movement.In November 2021, the Calcutta high court, acting on allegations of illegal teacher appointments, directed the CBI to investigate. The CBI investigation led to the arrest of former education minister Partha Chatterjee and several TMC MLAs and senior academicians. The CBI probe uncovered massive financial irregularities, including the recovery of substantial cash, and identified a firm named Leaps and Bounds, owned by family members of Mamata Banerjee as a key player in manipulating the recruitment process. The fraud involved blank answer sheets and tampered OMR sheets which were used to manipulate merit lists, implicating even five BJP leaders who were associated with TMC in the past.The state appealed at the Supreme Court, which temporarily halted terminations and recoveries in May 2024. Final hearings concluded in February 2024.
