KOLKATA | September 9, 2026 — Teachers who were terminated despite being classified as “untainted” have asked West Bengal school education minister Dipak Barman to help restore their jobs and arrange a meeting with chief minister Suvendu Adhikari, as a dispute over recruitment rules continues before the courts.
A delegation from the Deserving Teachers Rights Forum met Barman on Tuesday and submitted a written representation. The teachers said they had been assured in September 2025, when Adhikari was the Leader of the Opposition, that candidates found not to be involved in irregularities would be protected.
“When we met Suvendu, the leader of the Opposition in the Assembly, in September 2025, he promised that since the list of untainted candidates had been segregated from the tainted, he would take steps to ensure that those deserving got their jobs back,” Suman Biswas, one of the 15,403 untainted teachers who lost their jobs, said, according to the report. The delegation asked Barman to facilitate a meeting with the chief minister.
Barman said the decision could not be taken by him alone. “They (the teachers) met me. They have given their written submission. I heard them. I told them that the decision cannot be taken by me alone. I will send their applications to the chief minister,” he said in a text message.
The dispute began after the Supreme Court invalidated the appointments of 17,209 secondary and higher-secondary teachers in government-aided schools over what it described as a “vitiated” selection process conducted by the School Service Commission in 2016. The SSC subsequently identified 1,806 appointees as “tainted”, according to the account cited by the teachers.
The untainted candidates were required to take part in a fresh selection process to retain their jobs. The new panel was prepared after selection tests held in September 2025 and interviews conducted in January 2026. Rupa Karmakar, one of 12,500 candidates empanelled for Plus II-level teaching posts, said the central dispute had shifted from identifying tainted and untainted candidates to the effect of revised Other Backward Classes reservation rules.
“The government’s revision of the Other Backward Classes (OBC) quota has triggered fresh doubts over our recruitment, despite the SSC and Supreme Court declaring us untainted,” Karmakar said. She said the government’s decision to recast the panel midway through the recruitment process had affected the candidature of applicants and that cases had been filed before Calcutta High Court.
The government has reduced the OBC quota in government jobs from 17 per cent to 7 per cent. Adhikari said on Saturday that teachers would be appointed and that the government would follow orders of the high court and the Supreme Court. A senior SSC official, however, said the change would adversely affect many Muslim candidates.
Karmakar referred to an April 2025 Supreme Court order observing that the candidature of untainted applicants allowed to participate in the fresh selection process could not be “severely affected” by the application of new rules by the SSC. The Supreme Court has set May 31, 2027, as the deadline for completing the recruitment process.
