Calcutta HC overturns order cancelling appointment of 32,000 teachers in recruitment scam case

The Calcutta High Court on Wednesday overturned a 2023 order that had cancelled the appointment of about 32,000 primary school teachers in West Bengal in connection with an alleged cash-for-jobs recruitment scam, Live Law reported.

A division bench of Justices Tapabrata Chakraborty and Reetobroto Kumar Mitra set aside the order passed by Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay.

Gangopadhyay is now a Bharatiya Janata Party MP from Tamluk constituency in the Trinamool Congress-ruled state.

The controversy erupted in 2014 after 42,500 primary school teachers were recruited based on the Teachers' Eligibility Test conducted by the West Bengal Board of Primary Education.

Several candidates had later filed a petition in the High Court alleging irregularities in the recruitment process involving the payment of cash to secure jobs, Live Law reported.

In his order, Gangopadhyay had held that the appointments of 32,000 teachers were invalid on multiple grounds, including the absence of an aptitude test, the involvement of an external agency to conduct parts of the Teachers' Eligibility Test process and allegations that the board officials “sold” jobs to candidates, the legal news outlet reported.

On Wednesday, Chakraborty and Mitra observed that the single-judge bench had “gone beyond the pleadings” by cancelling the appointments based on the fact that no aptitude test had been conducted.

“For cancellation of the entire exam, there must be a finding on systemic malice as borne out by the evidence on record,” Live Law quoted the High Court as saying on Wednesday. “That is not the case.”

The judges also noted that there had been no complaint regarding the effectiveness of the candidates appointed as teachers.

“There is no allegation that students who paid money got more marks…a group of unsuccessful candidates should not be allowed to affect the entire system when it cannot be ruled out that untainted teachers may suffer greater ignominy and stigma,” Live Law quoted the bench as saying. “Service cannot be terminated on the basis of an ongoing criminal proceeding.”

The bench had begun hearing the matter in April.

The cancellation of appointments of 32,000 primary teachers had earlier been challenged before a division bench led by Justice Soumen Sen, who is now the chief justice of the Meghalaya High Court.

However, Sen recused himself from the case after which it was placed before the present bench.

In April, the Supreme Court had upheld a separate order of the Calcutta High Court terminating the appointment of more than 25,000 teachers and non-teaching staff by West Bengal's School Service Commission.

The Supreme Court had passed the order after observing that the recruitment process was “vitiated by manipulation and fraud”.

The High Court had issued the termination order in 2024 based on the findings of a re-evaluation of the Optical Mark Recognition sheets from the 2016 recruitment examination in the case.

The re-evaluation had found that the selected teachers had been recruited against blank Optical Mark Recognition sheets.

Source: Scroll
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