In a significant setback to the West Bengal government and the School Service Commission (SSC), a division bench of the Calcutta High Court on Thursday upheld an earlier order debarring ‘tainted’ candidates from the 2016 recruitment panel from participating in the newly announced 2025 teacher recruitment process.
The division bench of Justices Soumen Sen and Smita Das De dismissed the appeal filed by the state government and the SSC against a single bench order issued by Justice Sougata Bhattacharya on Monday, which had categorically directed the exclusion of individuals identified as having obtained their appointments fraudulently in the 2016 SSC recruitment scam.
The single bench had also held that if any such ‘tainted’ candidate had already applied for the 2025 recruitment, the application would be considered “deemed to be cancelled”.
The division bench, while hearing the appeal, posed sharp questions to the state and the SSC: “Can the School Service Commission defend the cause of candidates who were labelled as tainted by the Supreme Court in the recruitment scam?” The judges criticised the state’s stance, noting its apparent willingness to back candidates whose appointments had been declared void by the apex court due to large-scale corruption.
The Supreme Court, in a landmark order on April 3, 2025 (modified on April 17), had annulled the appointments of 25,753 teachers and non-teaching staff, citing pervasive fraud that “tainted and vitiated” the process. However, it allowed “not-tainted” candidates to continue temporarily until a fresh round of recruitment was completed by the end of the year.
Despite this, the 2025 SSC recruitment guidelines controversially allowed previously disqualified candidates to reapply, even awarding them an additional 10 marks for work experience—a move that prompted legal challenge from aggrieved teachers.
Senior Advocate Kishor Dutta, appearing for the state, argued that the Supreme Court’s order did not explicitly bar tainted candidates from participating in future recruitment. The SSC revealed that 188 such candidates had reapplied out of the 2.6 lakh applications received so far, while the total number of tainted candidates stood at 1,801.
Justifying the relaxation, senior advocate and TMC leader Kalyan Bandyopadhyay contended that barring these individuals would amount to punishing them twice. “They have already lost their jobs,” he submitted. “Disallowing them again is double punishment.”
However, senior advocate and CPI(M) leader Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, representing the respondents, pointed out the inconsistency in the state’s position. “Neither the state nor the SSC defended these candidates before the Supreme Court, yet they are now taking a different stance,” he said.
Firdaus Shamim, another counsel for the petitioning teachers, questioned the state’s motivation behind the appeal: “I fail to understand how the Supreme Court and subsequent High Court directions hurt the interests of the state government.”
With this ruling, the Calcutta High Court has reinforced the Supreme Court’s zero-tolerance stance on corruption in public recruitment, barring candidates deemed ineligible from exploiting the new selection process.
