On July 7, the single bench of Justice Sougata Bhattacharya had debarred ‘tainted’ candidates from the recruitment process conducted by WBSSC. The WB govt and WBSSC has approached the division bench against the single bench order.

A division bench of the Calcutta High Court on Thursday (July 10, 2025) upheld its single bench order directing the West Bengal School Service Commission to debar the ‘tainted’ candidates from appearing in the ongoing fresh recruitment process of teachers carried out by the Commission.

On July 7, the single bench of Justice Sougata Bhattacharya had not only debarred ‘tainted’ candidates from the recruitment process but directed that WBSSC shall consider any application by such tainted candidate should deemed to be cancelled.

The West Bengal government and the WBSSC had moved the division bench challenging the single bench order. A division bench of Justices Soumen Sen and Smita Das De on Thursday (July 10, 2025) rejected the State government and WBSSC petition and questioned as to why they were so keen on standing with the ‘identified-as-tainted’ and ‘illegible’ candidates of the 2016 panel who secured appointments through fraudulent means.

“Can the School Service Commission defend the cause of candidates who were labelled as tainted by the Supreme Court in the recruitment scam?” the bench had asked during the hearing.

The counsels appearing for the WBSSC had argued that by denying them opportunity to appear in the recruitment violates the fundamental rights of the ‘ tainted’ candidates. Senior Advocate Kalyan Banerjee who represented the WBSSC said that so far received applications from only 188 ‘tainted’ candidates have applied for recruitment out of over two lakh fresh applicants.

‘Tainted’ refers to candidates who took help of corruption and fraud in getting the jobs while ‘untainted” refers to teachers against whom no such allegations are there by WBSSC or Central Bureau of Investigation.

The Supreme Court in an order on April 3 had scrapped the entire 2016 SLST recruitment panel and annulled 25,753 appointments of teachers of classes IX-XII as well as Group C and Group D staff. The West Bengal government has started fresh recruitment for 44,000 posts which has to be completed by the end of this year.

Senior Advocate Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya who had represented teachers who have lost jobs after the Supreme Court order said that it was unfortunate that the West Bengal government had opposed the single bench order and came in support of ‘tainted’ candidates.