Teaching job aspirants who fail to reach cut-off mark for interview hold protest march in Kolkata

Kolkata, Nov 17 (PTI) A section of candidates, who wrote the teacher recruitment examination conducted by the SSC but failed to secure the cut-off mark required for interview even after scoring high marks, on Monday held a protest march in Kolkata.

They marched from Karunamoyee Crossing towards Bikash Bhavan, the education department headquarters in Salt Lake near here, but the police stopped them soon after near Central Park, saying they did not have permission to hold the rally. They sat where they had been stopped.

The School Service Commission held a recruitment examination last month after the Supreme Court invalidated SSC’s 2016 panel in April, annulling the appointment of nearly 26,000 teaching and non-teaching staff in state-run and -aided institutions after finding that the selection process was tainted.

The ‘untainted’ teachers who lost their jobs by the court order, but were not proved to have been involved in the irregularities and fresh candidates were allowed to appear for the examination.

After the SSC published the list of candidates who were called for the pre-interview verification, it is alleged that several of the fresh examinees did not get the call despite scoring high marks.

“I got 60 out of 60 in the written test and 10 out of 10 for the academic qualification. Still, I was not called for verification. This is a big surprise. Why, even after scoring 70 out of 70, didn’t I get a verification call?” asked Muktar Ahmed Khan of Malda, an English subject candidate.

Several others who participated in the protest march alleged they had secured perfect or near-perfect marks yet were not called for verification.

An SSC official said that the list of candidates who got the call for verification was prepared following the guideline that says 10 marks will be given for teaching experience, while 20 marks are for the interview.

The police deployed a large contingent, while the protesters refused to disperse, saying they would not move until their demands were met.

The demonstrators sought a three-point charter of demands from the state education department.

They sought withdrawal of the 10 marks awarded to job-lost teachers, which fresh candidates claim “unfairly” tilted the selection process towards them.

Their other demands are making public the OMR sheets of all candidates called for verification to ensure transparency, and increasing the number of vacant posts to one lakh because of prolonged delay in SSC exams and continuing unemployment. PTI BSM NN