Kolkata, April 25 -- On a day when the West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) admitted to irregularities in a small section of the list of over 16,000 'eligible' teachers forwarded to district inspectors' offices across the state in an apparent fracture between the protesting candidates, a group of teachers who had been staging a sit-in outside WBSSC office in Salt Lake, withdrew from the location while others continued to protest outside the SSC office in Salt Lake.

Claiming themselves as "untainted" and aligned with the Jogyo Shikshak Shikshika Oikyo Mancha (Forum of Eligible Teachers), the demonstrators have now reportedly relocated their agitation to the Shahid Minar grounds in Dharmatala. "Our agitation will continue.

We are shifting to Shahid Minar as we need to focus on filing a review petition in the Supreme Court," said Chinmoy Mondal, one of the leading voices of the movement.

With state-run schools open until April 29, before the summer break begins on April 30, the protesting teachers allegedly said they would attend school on a rotational basis to balance their responsibilities while continuing the movement. "Our responsibility towards our students cannot be ignored. Since there is a court directive, we will attend school until April 29. Once the summer break begins, we will resume our movement in full swing," said another teacher, Mehbub Mondal. In a parallel development, the West Bengal School Service Commission on Friday acknowledged anomalies in a small portion of the list of over 16,000 'eligible' teachers sent to the offices of district inspectors across the state.

The Commission said the discrepancies - such as missing names and new inclusions - were being corrected swiftly.

A top SSC official told a news agency that the Commission has ensured the salaries of around 16,000 'eligible' teachers who have not been implicated in any allegations of irregularities. He added that some "human errors" had crept in during the data compilation process, as the entire Commission had been working "on a war footing" to finalise the list of untainted candidates since April 21. "As the entire job was being completed in a time-bound manner, there might be a few human errors in feeding so much data into the system, which are being rectified. We will come out with a fresh list of names of all untainted teachers from the 2016 recruitment test, whose names were missing earlier, very soon," he said.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.