West Bengal: TET politics

It’s an indicator of the magnitude of the scale of educated unemployed in the eastern seaboard state of West Bengal (pop. 91 million), where too few jobs were created during 34 years of uninterrupted rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (1977-2011) because of a prolonged private investment famine and flight of capital. The Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) 2015 in West Bengal is becoming increasingly difficult to administer because of the huge numbers aspiring for teaching jobs. For a start, not expecting a ten-fold increase in applicants (from 365,000 in 2014 to 2.3 million this year), the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) didn’t print enough forms leading to a scramble for TET application forms, with crowds ransacking the branches of several nationalised banks on July 5. Subsequently WBBPE, which conducts the exam within the framework of the NCTE (National Council for Teacher Education), was forced to cancel TET 2015 scheduled for August 30, with the mysterious disappearance of a bundle of question papers in transit from Salt Lake to Hooghly forcing the board to reschedule the exam for October 11. But the October 11 TET didn’t go off smoothly either following reports of the question paper being leaked an hour prior to the test. According to media reports, pictures of the solved answer sheets were circulated on WhatsApp an hour before the exam. Nevertheless, TET 2015 was finally written by 2.3 million graduates in 5,200 centres statewide competing for 30,000 teachers’ jobs — 76 applicants for each vacancy — in the state’s 75,141 primary schools. Reports of the TET exam papers leak yet again, have prompted the state’s opposition parties to launch a scathing attack on chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s TMC government which is already firefighting the Sharada chit fund scam among a host of other corruption scandals. Calling for Banerjee’s resignation, BJP leader Rahul Sinha demanded cancellation and rescheduling TET 2015, and a CBI enquiry into the incident. However, according to TMC government spokespersons, there wasn’t any leak of the October 11 exam papers. While education minister Partha Chatterjee refrained from making a comment, Manik Bhattacharya, chairman of WBBPE told mediapersons: “No question paper was leaked. It was a picture sent by a person and received by another. Both must be arrested. It’s a crime. It’s a cyber crime.” This is hardly the first TET in jobs-starved West Bengal where a primary teacher’s job paying Rs.15,000 per month is highly prized, has been marred by controversy. In 2012, TET admission cards printed by WBBPE were riddled with errors and many eligible candidates were denied entrance into exam halls. The following year, a huge row erupted about allegedly tampered results of TET 2013 with charges that the list of successful TET candidates was “analysed” in Trinamool Bhavan, headquarters of the ruling TMC party in central Kolkata, prior to official publication. Yet despite such charges, the percentage of graduates clearing TET has ranged from a pathetic 1-1.07 percent. West Bengal’s academics — most of them appointed during CPM rule…