In 2014, Prasanta Manna became the first in his family of daily wagers to become a graduate.
But even with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, the 31-year-old from West Bengal’s Purba Medinipur district continued to struggle, working as a labourer to earn a living.
His luck turned when he cracked the 2016 West Bengal teacher recruitment test. In February 2019, he was appointed as an assistant teacher at a government school in South 24 Parganas, about 185 km from his village Badalpur.
“After I got the job, I started to breathe,” he said. “We married off my sister and built a home. I got married last year.”
For the last two weeks, however, Manna has been in despair.
On April 3, the Supreme Court struck down the appointment of 25,753 teachers and non-teaching staff in state-run and state-aided schools in Bengal, citing extensive fraud in the recruitment process that began in 2016.
Manna found himself without a job. “I still have a home loan of Rs 8 lakh to repay,” he said. “Besides the EMI, I need at least Rs 6,000 for medical bills for my elderly parents.”
The family’s financial condition was still precarious, he said. “My father still works as a daily wager. We only have one bigha of land, so we don’t have any other means of income.”
Manna’s story echoes across West Bengal as the Supreme Court order has upended the lives of thousands of teachers and schools.
For example, 39-year-old Noor Alam is one of three teachers at the Kidderpore Muslim High School to have had their appointments struck down. The school now has only six teachers for 1,000 students.
Alam is left disconsolate, having first got a government job and then lost it. “I have a three-year-old boy. My whole family depends on the job,” the Kolkata resident told Scroll. “After doing all the hard work and studying for years, we got a job. All that is gone and we are now left with sorrow and rage. This is complete injustice.”
For most of the teachers, the road ahead seems impossibly hard. “Ten years ago, I didn’t have a loan, and we somehow managed to live with what we had,” said Manna. “Now, there is a loan to pay and no income. I have to return to working as a daily-wage labourer if I don’t get the job back.”
While the court conceded that the majority of the teachers did not get their jobs by fraudulent means, it said it was impossible to distinguish between “tainted” and “untainted” teachers.
Many of the teachers said this was unjust.
“I got a job with my hard work and merit,” said Manna. “I did not pay any money to buy a job. Neither the CBI nor the court has been able to prove any wrongdoing on our part.”
Shubajit Das, a teacher of mathematics in South 24 Parganas district whose appointment has also been annulled, added: “We had thought that the court would do us justice, but it has taken away the jobs of the deserving teachers. It should have found a better solution.”
The Mamata Banerjee government, facing a backlash over the role of its ministers and bureaucrats in the scam, approached the Supreme Court seeking modification of its April 3 order.
It said that annulling the appointments of over 25,000 school staff “would have a devastating impact across the schools in the state”.
In response, the Supreme Court on April 17 allowed the “untainted” assistant teachers to remain in service till the end of the academic year or till the time the fresh recruitment process is completed.
However, it directed the Bengal government to issue advertisements for a fresh recruitment process by May 31 and the completion of the entire process by December 31 this year.
But Manna flinched from the idea of taking another recruitment test. “It has been 10 years since I sat for an exam,” he said. “And what is the guarantee that if we are selected our jobs will not be lost again?”
The scam
Among those who wrote the West Bengal School Service Commission test in 2016 was Setab Uddin.
The 35-year-old post graduate in history from Murshidabad had applied to be recruited as an assistant teacher for Class 9 and Class 10 students.
He did not clear the examination but was waitlisted with a serial number of 140, Setab Uddin told Scroll. “But I got to know that someone below me, who had been ranked 144, got the job,” he said.
In 2021, Setab Uddin and other teachers filed a petition at the Calcutta High Court, alleging that those lower in the merit list had been appointed as teachers. “The authorities picked and chose candidates, as a result of which less meritorious candidates got preference over us,” he said.
Other writ petitions were filed, challenging the selection process of 2016.
In November 2021, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay ordered an investigation by the CBI into the alleged irregularities in the recruitment process. Gangopadhyay went on to join the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2024.
By 2022, senior ministers and officials in the Mamata Banerjee government were facing the heat. Partha Chatterjee, who was the education minister till 2021 and one of Trinamool Congress’s tallest leaders, was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate for his role in the scam. Following Chatterjee’s arrest, several former high-level officials in the education department were arrested.
In April 2024, the Calcutta High Court ordered the termination of more than 25,000 jobs of teaching and non-teaching staff.
This order was upheld on April 3 by the Supreme Court bench, comprising Chief Justice of India Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar.
The top court in its judgment said “the entire selection process has been vitiated and tainted beyond resolution”. “Manipulations and frauds on a large scale, coupled with the attempted cover-up, have dented the selection process beyond repair and partial redemption. The credibility and legitimacy of the selection are denuded,” the judgment read.
The judgment noted that the West Bengal School Service Commission had admitted to several kinds of corruption in recruitment.
This included “rank jumping” candidates – those with lower ranks being chosen over those with higher ranks – being appointed even if they had not been shortlisted by the panel or recommended by the school service commission and the “manipulation” of marksheets.
The Supreme Court upheld the direction of the High Court that the services of tainted candidates, where appointed, must be terminated, and they should “be required to refund any salaries they have received”.
The candidates, who did not use unfair means, were not asked to refund or restitute any payments made to them. “However, their services will be terminated,” the judgement said.
Tainted and untainted
In the weeks after the order, several teachers have asked why the court has not insisted on separating the “tainted” teachers from the deserving ones.
In May 2024, the Supreme Court itself had mentioned that as an option, saying “it would be unfair to set aside all the appointments if the tainted and untainted ones can be segregated”.
A bench headed by Chief Justice DY Chandrachud had permitted the Central Bureau of Investigation to continue its inquiry, without taking any coercive action. “The issue which would merit closer analysis is whether the appointment which suffers from tainted can be segregated [from the genuine ones],” the bench said. “If such is possible then it would be wrong to set aside the entirety of the process.”
However, communist leader and lawyer Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, who represented several aggrieved candidates in the High Court and the Supreme Court, said it is impossible to make such a distinction.
“This is absolutely a dead end,” Bhattacharya told Scroll. “Because if the state government had material with them [that could establish who were the bribe givers] they could have disclosed it when the High Court had given them a chance repeatedly.”
However, the chairman of the West Bengal School Service Commission Siddhartha Majumdar, had provided lists of around 5,300 teaching and non-teaching staff members in whose recruitment it had found irregularities to the high court.
Later, in the Supreme Court, the commission acknowledged “that 6,276 illegal appointments were made”, the judgement said.
One of the irregularities involved the tampering of Optical Mark Recognition or OMR sheets.
Such sheets are digitally scanned by machines to tabulate the scores, and mirror copies are stored on the servers.
The CBI investigation had revealed mismatches between OMR sheets and the scores recorded by the commission, the Supreme Court judgement revealed. In some cases, it found that the appointments had been given to persons who had submitted blank OMR sheets.
The judgement shed light on the role of an agency based in the National Capital Region, who had been tasked by the West Bengal School Service Commission to carry out the evaluation. The agency, Nysa Communication Private Limited, had outsourced the work to another firm, allegedly without the commission’s knowledge.
According to the judgement, the CBI found during the course of investigation, that “several emails were found to have been exchanged between the accused officials of the commission, certain private persons and officials of NYSA”.
“These emails contained lists of candidates, whose OMR marks were found to be increased in the server of the commission,” the CBI said. “Besides this, emails have been exchanged between the staff of NYSA themselves containing manipulated data of candidates. This shows the complicity of the officials in this conspiracy.”
To make matters worse, the commission destroyed the physical OMR sheets a year after the test and did not maintain any electronic mirror copies.
So, when the School Service Commission argued in the Supreme Court that the evidence yielded by the CBI investigation could be used to “allow segregation of meritorious candidates from those appointed illegally”, the court refused to accept the argument.
“The contradictory stance of WBSSC on the possession and destruction of scanned/mirror copies of the OMR sheets reflect an attempt to cover up illegalities and lapses in the selection process,” the court said.
Anger against Mamata
Forced into a corner, the Mamata Banerjee government has taken a strident stand on the Supreme Court order.
“Please don’t consider that we have accepted it [the order],” the Trinamool Congress chief said during a meeting in Kolkata with some of the teachers affected by the order. “We are not stone-hearted, and I can even be jailed for saying this, but I don’t care.”
But the anger against her continues to brew, with protests taking place across the state.
“You (Mamata) are responsible for the mess,” said Apurba Maji, a 35-year-old teacher. “We have not done any fault, her leaders, ministers have done corruption and been sent to jail. But they are out on bail and we have lost our jobs.”
Political scientist Zaad Mahmood of Presidency University told Scroll that the development was a “bloody blow” to an education system already in crisis. “This matter has been going on for years and all records show that there was no effort by the government or the School Service Commission to distinguish between people who had indulged in fraudulent activity and people who hadn’t,” he said. “This is criminal.”
Anil Kumar Roy, an education activist based in Bihar, said that though several states have seen corruption in government job recruitment, it was rare for the judiciary to cancel jobs in such large numbers.
He pointed out that in Bihar the appointment of 25,000 teachers in 2023 came under cloud as thousands of candidates allegedly used fake educational degrees, marksheets and certificates to get appointments. “But till today, there was no proper investigation into it,” he said. “Many things are influenced by politics.”
Mahmood argued that the state government does not want the truth to emerge. “The tainted ones are the people who paid for their job,” he said. “If they are identified, then the Trinamool Congress’s money chain is exposed and people will start demanding their money back.”
The Supreme Court could have found a way out of this mess, Mahmood said, “but it chose not to involve itself”.
