Bengal publishes list of tainted non-teaching staff of scrapped panel

The West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) on Monday released a list of around 3,500 “tainted” non-teaching staff in state-run and state-aided schools, who are among the around 26,000 people whose jobs were invalidated after a Supreme Court order in April, a senior official said. The apex court on April 3 cancelled the appointments of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff, calling the entire recruitment process of 2016 “vitiated and tainted”. “Tainted” people are those whose involvement in the scam has been proved.

The SSC earlier posted lists of more than 15,000 “tainted” teachers on the directive of the top court. Now, the list of tainted non-teaching staffers has also been officially announced. Among the 3,512 “tainted” non-teaching staff employed to help in running classes 9-10 and classes 11-12, a total of 2,349 belonged to the Group D category, and 1,163 were working as Group C after the 2016 SSC recruitment panel was announced. The panel was later invalidated by the Supreme Court.

The tainted persons will be barred from the process of fresh recruitment test. The SSC is conducting new tests to recruit teachers and non-teaching employees. "The application for fresh recruitment (of non-teaching staff) tests began on November 3 and will continue for a month," he said. The commission aims to fill 2,989 Group C and 5,488 Group D posts in this tranche. At least 50 applications were submitted till Monday midnight, the official said.

As the panel of Group C and Group D staff qualifiers of the 2016 SSC recruitment test has already been scrapped, there is no legal hurdle in conducting fresh recruitment tests for the non-teaching employees, the official elaborated to a question. The SSC may publish in phases the results of recently held teacher recruitment tests for classes 9-10 and 11-12 in the first and second weeks of November.