Even as west bengal’s humongous teacher recruitment scam in which bribes aggravating Rs.400-500 crore changed hands is being investigated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) has scheduled a new Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) on December 11. This year, 690,931 candidates will write the 150-minutes exam at 1,453 centres statewide following which WBBPE will conduct interviews in its central office in the third week of December. Earlier, the interviews were conducted at the district offices of the board.
Given the magnitude of the scandal which has made national headlines and has severely dented the image of chief minister and Trinamool Congress Party (TMC) leader Mamata Banerjee, this time round WBBPE is determined to make the exam tamper-proof and transparent. According to Gautam Pal, president of WBBPE, the board is bringing in radical changes in the conduct of TET. The written examination, marking, interview, and subsequent counseling will be video-recorded. Moreover, to check impersonation and identify fake candidates, WBBPE will introduce a biometric system, and to strengthen invigilation, exam centres will be equipped with CCTV cameras and hand-held metal detectors.
All these unprecedented precautions have become necessary because in the TET 2014 and 2016 exam scandals, state education minister Partha Chatterjee, WBBPE president Manik Bhattacharjee and several top officials of the West Bengal School Service Commission were involved in wrongdoing and malfeasance. Several cases of ineligible candidates submitting blank optical mark recognition (OMR) sheets and being awarded 50 percent plus in the commission’s server at a later stage were discovered. According to the Enforcement Directorate, the financial frauds investigation unit of the Central government, a total of 8,163 candidates, including 952 in secondary, 907 in higher secondary, 3,481 in Group-C and 2,823 in Group-D level were recruited despite submitting blank OMR sheets.
Meanwhile even as a fresh crop of graduates are preparing to write TET 2022, over 200 aspirant government school teachers who had written and passed TET 2014 and 2016 have been staging a protest before Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in Esplanade in Kolkata’s central business district for over 600 days, demanding appointment letters. However, because of a slew of writ petitions filed by disgruntled candidates who wrote TET 2014 and 2016 alleging exam fraud and malpractice, the Calcutta high court has imposed a stay on recruitment. On November 9, Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay warned WBBPE that he will cancel the proposed December 11 exam if rules regarding recruitment of deserving candidates stipulated by the court are not followed.
Yet even as battles are being fought in the Calcutta high court, the prolonged teacher recruitment impasse is severely exacerbating the learning loss of students enroled in West Bengal’s government schools. According to Unesco’s State of the Education Report for India: No Teacher, No Class published in October 2021, West Bengal has over 100,000 teacher vacancies in government schools. Moreover, during the prolonged Covid-19 lockdown, only 9 percent of government schools had internet connectivity. Therefore 23 million children enrolled in government schools have experienced massive learning loss which the TMC government seems unable to make good.
With West Bengal’s once nationally reputed education sector in disarray, there’s rising disillusionment with chief minister Banerjee and TMC — now in their third term in office — who had made education reform a major plank in their election campaigns. With primary-secondary education experiencing severe disruption, West Bengal’s GER (gross enrolment ratio) in higher education has experienced a steep fall. According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE, 2018), the state’s GER is 19.3 percent against the national average of 27.1 percent.
“Lip service to welfare schemes under different names is good advertising. But it side-steps strong concerns about lost jobs among the poor and working class in the state. The education crisis is very grave and this state has become an exporter of skilled and unskilled migrant workers. Policy intervention is needed to provide decent jobs to the rising number of unemployed, starting with raising the public sector employment to earlier levels,” says Soham Bhattacharya, a correspondent of Student Struggle, a journal of the Students Federation of India.
Once the epicenter of the Bengal Renaissance of the late 18th to early 20th century which catalysed radical transformation of Indian society and planted the seeds of India’s anti-colonialist, nationalist freedom movement, following 34 years of uninterrupted communist rule (1977-2011) and TMC drift (2011 onwards), West Bengal’s education system has been reduced to sorry condition.
Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)
