The dimming electoral prospects of West Bengal’s ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) party led by its feisty chief minister Mamata Banerjee, reeling under impact of the Vivekananda flyover collapse in Kolkata on March 31 that resulted in the death of 25 unsuspecting citizens, and the Narada sting operation which revealed the complicity of the TMC with the ubiquitous syndicate (gangs of youth who corner construction material supply contracts) among other scams, are not likely to be helped by the continuous confusion surrounding the state government’s Teacher Eligibility Test (TET). The careers and future of thousands of prospective and in-service school teachers remain undecided due to recurrent cancellation of TET following question paper leaks, unpublished results, erroneous recruitment and pending court cases, even as there are 50,000 teacher vacancies in the state’s 92,000 government schools.

But even as the results of TET 2015 remain undeclared because of pending court cases, on February 16 the School Service Commission (SSC) of West Bengal published a notice inviting online applications for recruitment of 18,203 teachers for 10,000 government secondary and higher secondary schools statewide. However, continued ambiguity about the qualifications required to write TET continues to cause huge confusion among aspiring teachers.

According to the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), aspirants must have a B.Ed degree with a minimum average score of 50 percent to write TET. However the SSC guidelines demand B.Ed and a minimum of 50 percent only in the chosen honours subject. Moreover, in its February 16 notice, SSC also changed the criteria for teachers aspiring to teach in senior (classes IX-X) and higher secondary (classes XI-XII) schools, resulting in rejection of the application forms of an estimated 50,000 applicants. Under the new eligibility rules, B.Ed honours graduates are eligible to write TET for classes IX-X and to be eligible to teach in higher secondaries (classes XI-XII), postgrad qualifications are required. These “abrupt and random changes” in TET eligibility criteria have aroused fears of a rain of litigation.

This is hardly the first TET in jobs-starved West Bengal which has been marred by controversy. The state TET came under flak in its very first year (2012) when 3.4 million candidates wrote the test but only 18,000 passed, of whom 95 percent were fresh graduates. Newspapers in Kolkata were awash with reports that question papers had been leaked, and that teachers’ posts were cornered by TMC cadres and sympathisers. Despite this, the state government went ahead with the recruitment of teachers in 2013, many of whom immediately signed up for the two-year open and distance learning (ODL) training programmes of IGNOU, Kalyani, Jadavpur, and Vidyasagar universities, as NCTE guidelines made it mandatory for all teachers to be trained by March 31, 2015. This was again a breach of NCTE regulation which makes it mandatory for teachers to have at least two years’ teaching experience before signing up for ODL training. The next TET conducted in 2015 was also mired in controversy with insufficient application forms leading to a scramble and allegations of leakage and theft of question papers. Several cases alleging corruption in TET 2015 are pending in the Kolkata high court which has stayed results of the test.

Continuous TET scams and campus unrest in colleges and universities are dominating the academic discourse across West Bengal. The consensus of opinion is that during the past five years, the TMC government has followed the policy of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front government which ruled West Bengal uninterruptedly for 34 years (1977-2011) of packing education institutions with party cadres and sympathisers.

According to Tulsi Masant, convenor of D.L.Ed (Diploma in Elementary Education) Students Forum, which has played a pivotal role in exposing TET scams, the state government has repeatedly provided erroneous data to the Central government to relax NCTE rules relating to TET exams in West Bengal. “Although there are 350 teacher training colleges in the state from which 17,000 students graduate every year, the TMC government has been arguing that there aren’t enough postgrad B.Ed teachers in the state. Therefore untrained graduates should be permitted to teach and write TET after recruitment. Moreover by appointing teachers in 2013, the state government has acted without care for the future of candidates who might lose their jobs if their ODL training which violates NCTE norms, is not recognised,” says Masant.

As West Bengal waits for the results of its 16th legislative assembly election to be declared on May 19, one of the first challenges of the new government will be to cope with the teachers’ community and disgruntled TET aspirants who are gearing for mass protests.

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)