Agartala: A day after the Supreme Court granted a two-year extension in service to 10,323 school teachers in Tripura, who were engaged on an ad hoc basis after their contracts were terminated due to ‘unconstitutional’ recruitment rules in 2017, cracks seemed to have appeared among the aggrieved teachers.
Despite the breather announcement, around 1,000 teachers of the ‘All Tripura 10,323 Ad-hoc Pay Sikshak Karmachari Shangathan’ reportedly clashed with the ‘All Tripura 10,323 Teachers Association’ when they gathered at the Rabindra Bhawan hall to celebrate the development on Friday.
Bimal Saha, leader of the All Tripura 10323 Ad-hoc pay sikshak Karmachari Shangathan, said he was allegedly attacked by CPI-M members.
The CPI-M party, in turn, issued a statement saying: “We said we are beside them and we had made an appeal to the SC to extend their job. The party also demanded for a one-time relief for recruitment in the education department.”
Meanwhile, taking a dig at the CPI-M, BJP state vice-president Asish Saha said, “They had promised earlier saying they were beside the 10,323 teachers. But interestingly, today, we couldn’t see any activity from their side.”
The appointment of 10,323 teachers were cancelled by the Tripura High Court on May 7, 2014 after spotting irregularities in the recruitment process. The irregularities surfaced after 59 ‘qualified’ youths filed a petition in the high court.
The then Chief Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Swapan Chandra Das had passed the judgment that the jobs would end on Dec 31 that year, as appointments were not made following the norms.
The high court had asked the government to recruit those deprived youth and save the 10,323 jobs, but the then government didn’t go by the order and instead challenged the verdict in the apex court.
Later, the SC on March 29 last year upheld the judgment of the high court and said the jobs would end on December 31.
But the CPM government then requested the SC to extend the jobs for another six months as the schools would fall short of teachers in the middle of the session. Later the CPM government announced 12,000 non-teaching education staff posts to bypass the apex court’s order. But the government’s decision was challenged.
On Thursday, the teachers heaved a sigh of relief after the Supreme Court granted them a two-year extension in service.
