WHAT HAPPENED IN BENGAL?

West Bengal's teacher recruitment scam has stalled hiring for years and left generations of children without quality teachers.

- Pritha Roy Choudhury

On January 10, Moushumi Ghosh Das joined about 500 others at Sealdah in central 0 Kolkata to protest. It was a gathering of teaching aspirants who had successfully qualified the state's Teachers' Eligibility Test (TET) in the years from 2014 but had not been appointed.

They were demanding that the state government place them in schools. Originally from Bardhaman, Ghosh Das is now 33; she was 23 when she first cleared the TET in 2012.

"I appeared for the first time in 2012, I also appeared in 2014, 2015 and finally 2016, the result of which was declared in 2017, and in 2018 counselling started. It was only in 2022, after the court order, that I got to know my marks in academics, in written tests and in viva," said Ghosh Das, still awaiting to be recruited.

Seven teachers' organisations came together for the January 10 protest but there have been countless such demonstrations and gatherings for close to a decade as thousands of candidates who had qualified continued to wait for jobs. "I had appeared in all the examinations, be it for teaching the students of upper primary or secondary or higher secondary level students. I am confident about my ability, I should have cracked at least one," Ghosh Das added. She had cleared the test but no interview was held.

The teachers' situation has ballooned into West Bengal's "teacher recruitment scam" which has seen the arrests of former education minister, Partho Chatterjee; Kalyanmoy Ganguly, the former president of West Bengal Board of Secondary Education; and Trinamool Congress' (TMC) youth wing leader, Kuntal Ghosh. Central agencies, Central Bureau of Investigation and Enforcement Directorate, have launched investigations.

But in the din of the controversy, there's still no redress for the affected teaching aspirants.

Nothing seemed fair