Bengal govt questions contempt petition in teacher recruitment case in high court
Kolkata: A Calcutta high court division bench hearing the contempt petition by state-appointed schoolteachers in the bribe-for-job case on Wednesday allotted more time for hearing after the West Bengal government questioned the validity of the petition, lawyers present at the hearing said.
The contempt petition was filed by a section of the 25,752 teachers and non-teaching staff appointed in 2016. On April 3, the Supreme Court upheld the high court's April 2024 order and cancelled all these appointments saying there was no way to differentiate between tainted and non-tainted appointments. On an appeal by the state, the top court directed on April 17 that non-tainted teachers may continue in service until December 31 and ordered the state to start a fresh recruitment process.
'Counsels for the state and the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) told the division bench of justices Debangsu Basak and Shabbar Rashidi that the contempt petition, alleging that the 2024 high court order had been violated, was not maintainable because portions of that order were modified by the Supreme Court on April 3,' a lawyer for the state government said.
'The lawyers argued that a contempt petition can be moved only before the Supreme Court since the latter modified some of the directions of the high court,' the lawyer added.
The division bench will hear the matter again on April 28.
Claiming to be eligible appointees, the petitioners alleged that WBSSC and the state government violated the high court's April 2024 order by not publishing the optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets of the candidates who appeared for the selection test in 2016.
The state told the court in 2024 that the original OMR sheets were destroyed a year after the appointments following standard procedure.
The petitioners have claimed that soft copies of the OMR sheets are available on three hard disks that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) recovered after it started probing the alleged appointment scam following the high court's 2022 order.
Eligible and tainted appointees could be detected only if the OMR sheets were made public, the petition has said. The teachers have started a fresh agitation outside the WBSSC office since Monday with this demand.
On Tuesday, chief minister Mamata Banerjee appealed to them to return to work saying her government would file a review petition before the Supreme Court.
'Please go home. We are filing a review petition. Let the government do its job. You are getting your salary. Have faith in the government. Don't be misled,' Banerjee said at an administrative meeting in East Midnapore district.
Her appeal, however, had no effect on the agitators. The agitation continued on Wednesday.
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