Calcutta High Court directs WBBPE to revise and republish entire 2017 recruitment panel.
Thousands of teaching jobs now face re-evaluation over training status errors.
Kolkata: On June 24, in a critical decision, the Calcutta High Court asked the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) to revise and publishthe full list of 42,949 primary school teachers within four weeks.
This order was given by Justice Sougata Bhattacharyya and is seen as a strong step towards making the 2017 primary teacher recruitment process more honest and clear.
This case is especially important because it shows that there were mistakes in the marks and training status of many candidates. Now, the jobs of thousands of teachers are once again under doubt.
The issue started when a teacher, who was actually trained, was wrongly shown as “untrained” in the teacher list published by the board.
Even though this mistake was later corrected and the teacher started getting the right pay as a trained teacher, the official mark sheet still had the wrong information.
Because of this error, the teacher was worried that they might get included in the list of 32,000 teachers who were reportedly untrained and whose appointments are under question. To protect their career and to fix the record, the teacher filed a case in the High Court.
After carefully listening to the case, Justice Sougata Bhattacharyya gave some important orders to the West Bengal Board of Primary Education.
He said,
“The Board is directed to correct the records by acknowledging the petitioner as a trained candidate.”
He also said,
“It is not only the petitioner’s data but the entire panel of 42,949 teachers that must be revised and republished.”
The Court also gave a strict timeline to complete this process.
The judge stated,
“The Board shall complete the revision and republish the corrected panel within a period of four weeks from the date of this order,”
Background of the Case
The case began when a primary school teacher, who had successfully completed their training, was wrongly marked as “untrained” in the official recruitment panel published by the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) for the 2017 selection process.
Although the error was partially corrected later—allowing the petitioner to receive the trained teacher’s pay scale—the mistake continued to appear in the official marks break-up published by the Board.
This posed a serious risk, as the petitioner could have been wrongly included in the controversial list of 32,000 allegedly untrained teachers whose appointments were already under legal scrutiny.
To prevent such misclassification and protect their employment status, the petitioner approached the Calcutta High Court, demanding not only a correction of their own records but also a full revision and republication of the entire teacher panel to ensure accuracy and transparency for all candidates.
This led to the landmark verdict delivered by Justice Sougata Bhattacharyya, which has now triggered a large-scale re-evaluation of 42,949 primary teaching appointments made in 2017 across West Bengal.
Case Title:
WPA 20776 of 2019 — Phalguni Rakshit vs. State of West Bengal & Ors.
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