Bengal: Decoding the Supreme Court order to cancel teacher recruitment

The termination of 23,753 , ordered first by the Calcutta High Court in 2023 and upheld by the Supreme Court on 3 April 2025 threatens the political future of Mamata Banerjee.

The state government has been reeling from the blow and the chief minister finds herself between a rock and a hard place.

She has put up a brave face in public and vowed that she will not allow any loss of jobs — but that is easier said than done.

With the courts, the opposition and the media closely watching her every move, she dare not take another false step that can derail her bid to get re-elected in the assembly election in 2026 either.

Desperate appeals by the chief minister and the education minister for the terminated staff to keep working ‘without salary’ for the time being have already resulted in a contempt notice from court.

The shocking Supreme Court order relates to a recruitment process that started in 2014 with a state-level test.

An estimated 26 lakh aspirants took the test and recruitment began in 2016 through the School Service Commission.

The physical OMR (optical mark recognition) sheets — forms with check boxes for multiple-choice questions — used for initial screening candidates were destroyed by the SSC in July 2019, citing rules that mandated that OMR sheets only need to be preserved for one year after the examination is concluded.

The OMR sheets, however, related to the screening test for teachers — and not for the recruitment of the non-teaching staff.

Meanwhile, several disgruntled candidates petitioned the high court in 2019–20, complaining of irregularities in the recruitment process.

A key accusation was that recruitments were made even after the panel prepared after the tests had expired in 2019. A single judge bench of then-justice Abhijit Ganguly, who is now a BJP MP, ordered a CBI inquiry into the recruitment.

The investigation opened up a new can of worms, especially after then state and a close aide, Arpita Mukherjee, were arrested in August 2022. The investigation by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate alleged that the duo had amassed disproportionate wealth, amounting to Rs 103 crore.

In April 2024, the agencies arrested a former advisor to the SSC and a middleman and charged them with collecting Rs 203 crore from ineligible candidates after promising to employ them.

The West Bengal School Service Commission meanwhile claimed to have identified 5,303 ‘tainted’ candidates on the basis of mirror images or scanned copies of OMR sheets recovered by the CBI.

The Supreme Court ruled that this did not remove the taint from the process followed.

It also pointed out that several of the invalidated candidates, many of them Group D staff, were ranked lower than those not selected, raising more questions. Further, candidates from outside the shortlist were also appointed, among them those who were not recommended by the SSC.

The protesting teachers and non-teaching staff who have been ‘un-recruited’ by the Supreme Court order are now demanding that the SSC publish the mirror images of all 22 lakh candidates’ OMR sheets, along with the list of those identified as tainted and untainted.

They hope this transparency might provide grounds for a review of the Supreme Court’s decision.

While pronouncing the verdict on 3 April 2025, Chief Justice of India Sanjeev Khanna observed:

In our opinion, this is the case where the entire selection process is vitiated and tainted beyond resolution. Manipulation and fraud on a large scale, coupled with the intention to cover up have tainted the selection process beyond repair. The legitimacy and credibility of the selection process are denuded…

The state government is scrambling to resolve twin challenges, meanwhile: the first is the need for alternative arrangements, so that students do not suffer, and the second is providing alternative employment to the terminated staffers.

Both exercises are time-consuming and will have to be carried out under intense public scrutiny.

While the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, has written to the President of India to intervene on humanitarian grounds, legal experts do not believe it is feasible for Droupadi Murmu to actually do so.