The high court on Friday directed the president of the state primary education board to pay a compensation of Rs 20,000 from his pocket to each of 19 petitioners who had appeared in a teachers’ eligibility test (TET) in 2015.
The candidates who will benefit from Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay’s order were not awarded marks by the board for their answers to the questions the court had declared incorrect.
Justice Samapti Chatterjee had in October 2018 directed the board to award full marks to the candidates who had answered the questions that the court had declared wrong based on a report by a team from Visva-Bharati.
Since the order has not been carried out yet, Justice Gangopadhyay said on Friday that Bhattacharya would have to compensate the petitioners from his pocket.
If the petitioners are found eligible after awarding the marks, they have to be appointed immediately, Justice Gangopadhyay ruled.
Calls and text messages to Manik Bhattacharya, the president of the West Bengal Board of Primary Education, from this newspaper were not answered.
Bikram Banerjee, appearing for the petitioners, said his clients had suspected that some of the questions were wrong after writing the test in 2015.
They filed a plea in the high court under the Right to Information Act to get copies of the question paper, the OMR answer sheets and the answer key based on which the scripts were evaluated.
“After the candidates moved the court alleging that some questions were wrong, the court had in June 2018 asked Visva-Bharati to find out whether the charge was true,” Banerjee said.
Learning a lesson from the fiasco, an official said the primary education board uploaded on its website model answers to all questions in the TET held in January 2021 to recruit teachers for primary schools.