Kolkata, A section of protesting teachers, who have laid siege to the West Bengal School Service Commission headquarters here, on Wednesday allowed its chairman Siddhartha Majumdar to leave his office after 40 hours but continued their sit-in for the third day.
Majumdar appeared before the Calcutta High Court during the day in connection with a hearing related to the presentation of OMR sheets of the 2016 SSC recruitment test.
The agitators, who launched the demonstration at 2 pm on April 21, vowed that their sit-in would continue, and around 500 of them remained at the site this evening.
Earlier in the day, Majumdar told PTI that he had returned home and would take rest for some time before attending the court proceedings as per schedule.
One of the protesters belonging to the Deserving Teachers Forum said Majumdar was allowed to leave his office because he had to be physically present at the court, and also to give him some reprieve from confinement on health grounds.
“Our sit-in will continue as usual…Majumdar will again be gheraoed once he returns to his office,” he said.
Another forum leader Dhritish Mondal claimed that the list of untainted teachers sent to the offices of district inspectors of schools on Wednesday did not include the names of 10-11 members of the forum, all deserving teachers.
He also said the SSC chairman told them that it was a technical error and a fresh list with these 10-11 omitted names would be sent in a day or two.
The eligible teachers whose names did not figure on Wednesday’s list included Chinmoy Mondal, one of the participants in a series of talks among the forum members, WBSSC and the education minister in the past.
Around 500 ‘eligible’ teachers, part of the 26,000 rendered jobless following the April 3 Supreme Court order, were currently on a sit-in outside the SSC office on Wednesday, on the third day, demanding permanent reinstatement of the ‘untainted’ teachers and immediate termination of the over 1,000 candidates of the 2016 SSC Recruitment Exams, who were found to be tainted.
In another development, eight non-teaching staff, among the 26,000 whose jobs were invalidated following the Supreme Court order on April 3, launched a fast inside the SSC office demanding reinstatement.
During the day, the Calcutta High Court heard a contempt petition against the department of school education, claiming that it has not uploaded OMR sheets of 26,000 teaching and non-teaching staffers who lost their jobs following the Supreme Court judgment.
Around 2,000 jobless teachers launched the indefinite sit-in before the SSC headquarters on April 21, the day the commission promised to upload the list of ‘tainted’ and eligible candidates for the 2016 examinations but could not, citing legal issues.
A delegation of the protesting teachers met the SSC chairman on Tuesday and held a discussion, which they termed “partially satisfactory”.
“We are partially satisfied with the list of 17,206 teachers of whom 15,403 are eligible as confirmed by SSC,” spokesperson of the Deserving Teachers Forum, Chinmoy Mondal, told reporters.
Altogether 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff of state-aided schools lost their jobs after the apex court found large-scale irregularities in the 2016 recruitment process and scrapped the entire panel on April 3.
The Supreme Court, on April 17, extended till December 31 the services of terminated teachers found untainted by the CBI, but left out the non-teaching staff.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.