The state primary education board will hold the Teachers’ Eligibility Test (TET) by December to start the process of appointment of teachers for government-aided primary schools, said an official of the board.
An ad hoc committee that has been tasked with running the board held an emergency meeting on Friday evening and decided that the exams would be held by December.
The TET for the recruitment of primary school teachers was last held on January 31, 2021, months before the Assembly elections.
Although 9,600-odd candidates had cracked the test held in January 2021, the board could not recommend appointments amid the controversy over alleged irregularities in recruitments. The controversy led to the removal of Manik Bhattacharya from the post of board chief by the high court.
“We will hold the test within December. Dates have not been finalised yet. We will hold discussions with the education department before finalising the dates,” said Goutam Paul, president of the committee that is running the board.
Though Paul announced that the test would be held by December, an official of the board, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the exam was unlikely to be held before December. “The Puja vacation will start soon and the exam requires massive preparations. The test will be held in December,” he said.
The board has started seeking a list of centres for holding the TET from the district primary school councils.
On Thursday, it recommended the names of 185 candidates, who had written the TET in 2016, for appointment in compliance with a directive of Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay of the high court.
An official of the education department said they wanted to conduct the recruitments while the court-monitored probe into alleged irregularities in recruitments was on.
Justice Gangopadhyay had in June asked the CBI to file an FIR to initiate an investigation into the alleged illegal recruitment of teachers by the board, based on the 2014 TET, and asked 269 teachers, identified as appointed illegally, not to attend school and to refund the amount they had drawn as salary.
“The court has not come in the way of making fresh recruitments. The ad-hoc committee was constituted in August to carry out this recruitment process in a fair way. The committee has started its work to hold the TET by the end of this year,” said the official.
In late July, in response to an order by Justice Gangopadhyay, the state education department had filed an affidavit stating that 3,906 posts of assistant teacher in primary schools were vacant. “By holding the TET, we will fill the vacancies as much as possible,” said a board official.
Swapan Mandal of the Bengal Teachers’ and Employees Association said: “Since the CBI and ED (Enforcement Directorate) have begun investigations (into allegedly illegal recruitments), it is likely that many more teachers will lose their jobs. That will also create more vacancies, which will have to be filled by appointing candidates who had cracked the TET in January 2021 and will crack the TET in December 2022”.
The primary education board had on August 30 asked the district primary school councils for information on appointment letters for the posts of primary teachers from 2011 because “the entire process... is under the investigation of… the Enforcement Directorate”.