-Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) Even as west Bengal’s monumental teachers’ recruitment scandal in which cash mountains of Rs.100 crore were discovered in the palatial home of actress Arpita Mukherjee, mistress of education minister Partha Chatterjee, is being investigated by the CBI and Enforcement Directorate (ED), the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) held a fresh Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) on December 11. In the new TET held after an interregnum of five years, 690,931 college and university graduates wrote the test to qualify for 11,000 primary teachers’ positions in West Bengal’s 92,000 government-owned and aided schools. TET 2022 of 150 minutes duration was held in 1,460 exam centres statewide amid heavy security and police presence. Although there are reports of exam paper leakages, cheating, impersonation etc — which have been a feature of previous TETs — at the time of writing, candidates are apprehensive about behind-the-scenes marking and paper substitution scams which have stymied teacher recruitment since 2014. That’s because the Calcutta high court has taken a dim view of teacher recruitment scandals in the state and has frequently cancelled flawed TETs and stayed recruitment. On December 6, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay said he would, “cancel the appointment of 42,000 candidates who had passed TET 2014 if they are found to have been recruited illegally”. This comment was made after WBBPE published the detailed scores of TET 2014 qualified candidates following orders of the Calcutta high court. It was found that some candidates had scored 10.96 points out of the maximum 10 in a TET higher secondary paper. WBBPE explained this away as a technical error. Government school teachers’ jobs are highly prized in this state which suffered sustained capital flight and de-industrialisation during 34 years (1977-2011) of uninterrupted rule by the CPM (Communist Party of Marxist) where unemployment (7.6 million registered unemployed youth) is pervasive and small and medium scale industry salaries are rock-bottom. A government school teacher’s job with starting pay of Rs.33,000 per month after implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission recommendations in 2020, is so highly prized that families desperate for sons and daughters to be employed as teachers in government schools often sell property and/or take loans to pay upto Rs.20 lakh as bribes to government officials to land these jobs. Therefore since 2015, disgruntled TET failures and civil activists have filed a string of petitions, obtained ten recruitment and appointment stay orders, CBI investigation and more than 1,000 appointment orders have been revoked even as education minister Chatterjee and former WBBPE chairman Manik Bhattacharya have been arrested. With recruitment for government schools stymied since 2012 because of a series of scams in recruitment tests and pending court cases, thousands of youth who aspire to teach in government schools are suffering extreme frustration. And with no fresh SLST (state level standard testing) or TET exam held in the past five years, 1.2 million aspirant teachers statewide who acquired B.Ed degrees have now become age-ineligible (age upper limit: 40 years) to write TET/ SLST. With teacher recruitment…
