Three teachers who were on a hunger strike after the Supreme Court rendered jobless 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staffers by terming their recruitment by West Bengal’s School Selection Commission (SSC) as “tainted beyond redemption” suspended their protest on Sunday.
Pankaj Roy, Suman Biswas and Pratap Kumar Sahar—who started the hunger strike on April 10— drank coconut water in the afternoon in Kolkata and said they were now planning a larger movement.
Pratap Roy told reporters, “The three demands we protested for have not been fulfilled yet. We had asked the police if we could have a cover over our heads due to the scorching heat but the police and administration are not cooperating.”
He alleged that a group of men from a particular political party were coming on bikes and harassing them.
According to Roy, a section of the protesters had emailed the CBI, which investigated the SSC recruitment case, asking for mirror images of their OMR answer sheets, adding the request had been granted and that the images would be handed over to them on April 15.
The job losers recently organised a mega rally demanding the mirror images of their OMR sheets be revealed and that separate lists of “tainted and untainted candidates” be published.
After an assurance made by the government on April 11, thousands of teachers who were conducting a sit-in demonstration outside the SSC office have moved back to their usual protest site near Sahid Minar in the Esplanade area, stating that they did not want to cause any more hindrance to common people. But they have vowed not to stop their protest till an official list of “untainted” job holders is published.
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On April 3 the Supreme Court upheld a 2024 Calcutta High Court judgment annulling the recruitment of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staffers appointed in a 2016 recruitment drive, terming the entire selection process “vitiated and tainted”. The SSC had earlier told both the courts that it no longer had the OMR sheets or their digital copies stating that they had already been destroyed.
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