Kolkata, Apr 11 (PTI) The West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) is ready to publish the digital mirror images of Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets of all 22 lakh candidates who appeared for the 2016 exams with appropriate legal advice, Education Minister Bratya Basu said on Friday.

The announcement came after teachers and non-teaching staff, who lost their jobs in the wake of a Supreme Court verdict, held a protest rally and followed it up with a meeting with the minister at Bikash Bhavan, the state education department headquarters in Salt Lake, which lasted for nearly two and a half hours.

Emerging from the meeting with 13 representatives of the agitating teachers, Basu said the state government was hopeful of publishing the list within two weeks.

“Since the matter concerns a judgment of the Supreme Court which we cannot violate, we are seeking legal advice to publish the list of deserving and tainted candidates by means of putting up the OMR sheets concerned on the SSC website.

“If there are no legal hurdles, we should be able to complete the task within two weeks,” the minister said, while confirming that the prospective deadline for publication is April 21.

The Supreme Court court had on April 3 upheld a 2024 Calcutta High Court judgment annulling the recruitment of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff appointed through the 2016 SSC recruitment drive, terming the entire selection process “vitiated and tainted”.

Flanked by SSC Chairman Siddhartha Majumdar and state secondary education board president Ramanuj Ganguly, both of whom attended Friday’s meeting, Basu said though the SSC does not retain digital images of the OMR sheets in question, it possesses copies of those sheets retrieved by the CBI during its course of investigation, and which the agency later shared with the Commission.

“Today’s meeting was a follow-up to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s assurance to teachers at Netaji Indoor Stadium earlier this week. We will provide all legal protection and assistance to teachers who unfairly lost their jobs,” he said.

Maintaining that the teachers were able to put forward all their demands at the meeting, Sujoy Biswas, representing the protesting teachers, said they would continue with their agitations till the government ensured reinstatement of deserving teachers in their respective schools.

“We had detailed talks and were assured of publication of the list by April 21 following the opinion of legal experts. We will take a call on our future course of action after that. We too will consult our lawyers,” Biswas said.

“We will be satisfied only after we win this battle through legal route and restore our respect and dignity,” added Mehboob Mondal, another teacher.

Earlier in the day, familiar scenes of mass agitation returned to the streets of Kolkata’ – echoes of the recent protests over the ghastly rape-murder at RG Kar Hospital – when chants of “we want justice” from thousands of aggrieved teachers and non-teaching staff marching along Salt Lake shattered the sultry afternoon air.

Their march from Karunamoyee to Acharya Sadan, the SSC office, in demand for publication of the OMR sheets to identify the genuine qualifiers of the 2016 SSC exams and whose entire panel was annulled by the top court.

The SSC had earlier told both the Calcutta High Court and the Supreme Court that it no longer has the OMR sheets or their digital copies, as they were destroyed.

Protestors squatted on the road and eagerly awaited the outcome of the crucial meeting with the education minister.

“We will not leave the streets until a mutually agreeable solution is found to this impasse,” a protestor said.

“This agitation will only gain momentum if the state government fails to reinstate the deserving candidates who were put in the same bracket and punished with the tainted ones who gained employment by fraudulent means,” she added.

Meanwhile, demanding immediate demarcation between tainted and untainted candidates, three ‘eligible’ teachers from state-run schools continued their indefinite fast outside the SSC office which they started on Thursday.

The teachers – Pankaj Roy, Suman Biswas and Pratap Kumar Saha – vowed to continue their protest until the SSC published the OMR sheets.

Former Calcutta High Court judge-turned-BJP MP Abhijit Gangopadhyay was greeted with “go back” slogans when he visited the agitation site.

The protesters said they do not want political figures in their agitation, while Gangopadhyay, before leaving the spot, claimed that ultra Left-backed protesters were behind the slogans raised against him.

At the Kolkata Police headquarters in Lalbazar, officers claimed that several outsiders apart from agitating teachers were present during Wednesday’s rally at the District Inspector (DI) of Schools’ office in Kasba, which turned violent and left 13 police personnel injured.

Police Commissioner Manoj Verma said, “Besides the teachers, outsiders were also present in the rally in Kasba on April 9. We have identified them but cannot disclose their identities for the sake of our investigation.” He asserted that police personnel exercised restraint during the agitation until they were provoked and attacked.

“It was a teachers’ programme. We made arrangements accordingly and never expected that teachers would engage in assaulting police officers. There is a difference between putting up a lock and breaking it,” Verma alleged. PTI SUS BSM SCH MNB RBT SMY NN