Calcutta : A division bench of the Calcutta High Court on Wednesday overturned a single-bench order that had terminated the appointments of 32,000 primary teachers in connection with the cash-for-jobs scam case. The Calcutta High Court stated that not all appointments were proven to be irregular and recognised the significant adverse impact that terminating employment after nine years would have on the teachers and their families.
There must have been a possibility of systemic malice, assessment of data doesn’t point to the same… A group of unsuccessful candidates cannot be allowed to damage the entire system. A job taken away after 9 years of service would cause insurmountable difficulty,” the bench ruled, as reported by Live Law. Investigations led by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), under the court’s direction, identified 264 appointments with irregularities, and another 96 teachers later came under scrutiny.
The single judge’s earlier order had cited the absence of an aptitude test, the involvement of an external agency in the recruitment process, and allegations of jobs being sold as reasons for cancelling the appointments. The controversy originated from petitions filed by candidates who alleged large-scale irregularities, including cash-for-jobs in the 2014 recruitment.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court upheld a separate order cancelling over 25,000 state school jobs from a 2016 recruitment panel managed by the West Bengal School Service Commission. A division bench of the HC set aside a single bench order that scrapped the appointments of 32,000 primary school teachers in West Bengal. These teachers were recruited through the Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) of 2014. The bench, presided by Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty, said it is not inclined to uphold the single bench order as irregularities have not been proven in all the recruitments.
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