After the Supreme Court of India deferred the hearing on alleged irregularities in teachers’ recruitment by the West Bengal School Service Commission (SSC) on Tuesday to January 15, a wave of disappointment has taken over protesting job aspirants and job holders who had hoped for justice.

“We have been protesting for 1,308 days as of today. There aren’t words to describe the disappointment we feel as the case keeps getting dragged on like this,” Abhishek Sen, said one of many job aspirants who had taken to the streets of Kolkata since 2019 to protest against the alleged appointment of unworthy candidates in teaching jobs in the State-run schools of West Bengal.

West Bengal’s political landscape has been dominated for over two years by the teacher recruitment ‘scam’, especially since the arrest of former West Bengal Education Minister Partha Chatterjee in July 2022 and consequently of numerous other Trinamool Congress leaders. The scam revolves around the alleged recruitment of ‘unworthy candidates’ for teaching and non-teaching staff in State-run schools.

In April 2022 last year, the Calcutta High Court had cancelled nearly 26,000 job appointments of teaching and non-teaching staff from the 2016 recruitment panel by the SSC. But on May 7, the Supreme Court had stayed the Calcutta High Court order. During its December 19, 2024 hearing, the Supreme Court bench questioned whether it was possible to segregate tainted and untainted candidates.

“With every passing day that we, the deprived candidates, do not get justice, our agony of living goes up as does our dismay over the fact that unworthy people are still working in and earning from these teaching jobs,” Mr. Sen said.

He added that the increasing expense of being unemployed while fighting in court as well as in protest sites for so many years has taken a toll on all the job aspirants who have been waiting for justice. “The financial distress we have been under is indescribable but it’s a matter of our rights, so we won’t quit our fight either,” he said.

On the other hand, those who were recruited in the 2016 recruitment panel also face uncertainty over the future of their jobs. “I did not resort to any unfair means and there were no irregularities in my job appointment. Yet, on April 22, 2024, even untainted candidates like me stood to lose our jobs following the Calcutta High Court order cancelling all 26,000 appointments,” Mehebub Mondal (34), who currently teaches in a State-run school in South 24 Parganas, said.

He added that untainted candidates like him have been put through various levels of investigation by different agencies when the 2016 SSC panel came under scrutiny for alleged irregularities. However, after the Supreme Court stayed the Calcutta High Court order to cancel all appointments made from the 2016 panel, job holders like Mr. Mondal returned to work as teachers, even partaking in assigned duty during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.

“We have not been named in any report of any of these investigations. But we have been clubbed with tainted candidates and our future has been made uncertain, despite the SSC and the investigative agencies being fully aware of who the tainted candidates are, following their investigations,” Mr. Mondal alleged.