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Calcutta HC reserves order on plea against stipend for jobless school staffers
Calcutta high court’s justice Amrita Sinha reserved its order after hearing the arguments on the plea against the financial assistance
KOLKATA: The Calcutta high court on Monday reserved its verdict on a plea against the West Bengal government’s decision to extend financial assistance to the 2016-batch Group C and D non-teaching school staff whose appointments were cancelled by the Supreme Court in April in the bribe-for-job case.
The single bench of justice Amrita Sinha reserved its order after two rounds of hearing during the day, said senior lawyer Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, who appeared for the petitioners, job aspirants who did not get selected in the 2016 tests allegedly due to the irregularities.
Bhattacharya told the court that the state government had violated the Supreme Court’s April 3 decision that did not grant any relief to the non-teaching Group C and Group D staffers.
The state government defended the scheme, saying it wanted to temporarily provide “limited livelihood, support and social security” to families of the employees on humanitarian grounds.
The appointments of all 25,752 school teachers and non-teaching staff (Group C and D) from the 2016 recruitment panel were cancelled by the top court on April 3, observing that there was no way to segregate the tainted from the non-tainted.
Following an appeal by the state government, the top court on April 17 allowed the non-tainted teachers to continue in service until December 31, the deadline for completing the fresh recruitment process. These teachers were also allowed to appear in the recruitment exam in relaxation of the standard age limit.
The top court, however, did not allow any relief for the non-teaching staff.
On June 3, separate petitions were filed at the high court challenging the format of the fresh selection process for teachers and Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s decision to offer a monthly stipend of ₹25,000 and ₹20,000 to the jobless Group C and D staffers, respectively.
A petition challenging the fresh selection test was also listed for hearing on Monday but the vacation bench of justice Saugata Bhattacharyya directed the case to be listed in July.
The irregularities in the 2016 recruitment test hit the headlines in May 2022 when the Calcutta high court ordered the Central Bureau of Investigation to probe the appointment of non-teaching staff (Group C and D) and teaching staff by the West Bengal School Service Commission and the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education between 2014 and 2021 when TMC’s Partha Chatterjee was education minister.
The Enforcement Directorate, which started a parallel probe, arrested Chatterjee in July 2022. ED filed charges against him, ex-primary education board president and legislator Manik Bhattacharya and 52 others in January this year.
