Kolkata, Apr 21 (PTI) The agitating teachers on Monday decided to launch an indefinite sit-in outside Acharya Sadan, the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) headquarters, on Monday night after the recruitment body failed to release, by the 6 pm deadline, the list of 2016 SSC qualifiers whose jobs were annulled by the Supreme Court.

SSC Chairman Siddhartha Majumdar said he needs to talk to lawyers before making any statement on the issue.

Alleging that they have run out of patience, the protestors clashed with the police and tried to breach barricades to lay siege to the SSC office, after news trickled out that the commission considers that only the first three of the 12 rounds of counselling held for the now-invalidated teachers are valid, implying names of teachers recruited from the fourth round would not feature in the list of ‘deserving’ candidates.

Besides putting up a gherao to stop SSC chairman Siddhartha Majumdar and other staff from leaving the building, the agitating teachers also laid siege before the adjacent Derozio Bhavan, the office of the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education, to prevent the board president Ramanuj Ganguly from leaving office.

A 13-member delegation from the agitating teachers held a meeting with Majumdar, which ran for several hours since 4.30 pm.

Agitated teachers, numbering about 2,000, blocked roads before the SSC office and announced their intention to stay put till the commission published the list as promised.

“We received information from our representatives inside that the SSC is planning to upload the list of untainted candidates up to the third counselling since they claim most of the tainted recruitments took place in the next nine rounds in upper classes of secondary and higher secondary level,” Suman Biswas, an agitating teacher, said.

“This is grossly unfair and amounts to a further attempt by the commission to obliterate transparency. We will not accept this and will remain here until the complete list of untainted candidates from all counselling sessions along with certified OMRs is presented to us,” he added.

Prafulla Bera, a school teacher from Purba Medinipur district, alleged that the SSC was still trying to shield the tainted candidates and present a distorted picture before the court.

“What about the tainted candidates who are there in the first three and the remaining counselling rounds? Where is that list?” Bera asked.

Emerging from the meeting, one of the 13 teachers said, “The SSC could not shed much light about posting a full list of tainted and untainted candidates.

“They claimed to have prepared the first, second and third counselling list of untainted candidates but we want a comprehensive list from the first counselling till the last one to segregate the eligible and tainted candidates. We want all those identified as tainted in the counselling sessions be omitted. They could not satisfy us.” The agitating teachers also demanded the resignation of the SSC chairman and state Education Minister Bratya Basu.

Earlier in the day, hundreds of teaching and non-teaching staff, whose appointments were invalidated by the Supreme Court, staged a protest march to the SSC office demanding the immediate publication of the list of candidates who had qualified in the 2016 SSC recruitment test.

The education minister had on April 11 said the WBSSC would publish the complete list of untainted and tainted candidates separately on its website within two weeks.

A spokesperson for the Deserving Teachers Rights Forum also claimed that during discussions, WBSSC chairman Siddhartha Majumdar and Basu had promised the list would be uploaded by April 21.

Contacted late evening, SSC Chairman Siddhartha Majumdar told PTI “I will do some conferencing with our lawyer before giving any official statement on the issue.” Mehbub Mondal, on behalf of the deserving teachers’ forum, said, “We will not allow the SSC Chairman or anyone else to leave the premises till the entire list is uploaded.” The protestors earlier marched from Karunamoyee Central Park to Acharya Sadan — the WBSSC headquarters at Wipro Crossing — before launching an indefinite sit-in, reiterating their demand that the promised list must be published by the stated deadline of 6 pm.

West Bengal Junior Doctors Front, which had been at the forefront of the movement to demand justice for the R G Kar hospital’s rape and murder victim in 2024, pledged solidarity with the protesting teachers.

The Supreme Court, in its April 3 verdict, declared the entire 2016 recruitment panel created by the SSC as null and void, citing widespread irregularities.

The ruling led to the termination of around 26,000 teaching and non-teaching staff from state-run and state-aided schools across West Bengal. PTI SUS MNB SMY NN