The Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM)-led Left Front government of West Bengal is experiencing huge embarrassment in the wake of the Calcutta high court’s interim order dated September 24, staying the teacher recruitment process begun by the administration in 2006 to appoint 56,000 teachers in the state’s 52,000 primary schools.
Way back in February 2006, the state government had invited applications from individuals awarded Primary Teacher Training Institute (PTTI) diplomas, to fill vacancies in its primary schools. It was only after several lakh application forms had been received that the government discovered that the diplomas awarded by the 142 PTTIs were invalid. Incidentally, 58 of the state’s 142 PTTIs are run by the government itself. The authenticity of PTTI diplomas are under a cloud because none of them have been certified by the Delhi-based National Council of Teacher Education (NCTE).
NCTE was established on August 17, 1995 in pursuance of the provisions of the National Council for Teacher Education Act, 1993, passed by Parliament. The supervisory mandate given to NCTE is very broad and covers the entire gamut of teacher education programmes including research and training of teachers in pre-primary, primary, secondary and senior secondary schools.
With typical ineptitude, the West Bengal government neglected insp-ection and certification of PTTIs in the state by NCTE. Consequently the 200,000 graduates of West Bengal’s 142 PTTIs are left with worthless pieces of paper in their hands. NCTE has refused to recognise the state’s PTTIs because the latter run one-year courses (cf. two years prescribed by NCTE) and admit class X qualified students (cf. class XII mandated by NCTE).
An aggrieved party immediately filed a PIL (public interest litigation) in the Calcutta high court which ruled on February 28, 2006 that certificates issued by PTTIs, unapproved by NCTE, are “invalid”. Since then, the recruitment process has been in limbo. Three years later, in August 2009, the Left Front government tabled a Bill in the state legislative assembly to regularise West Bengal’s PTTI diplomas. However, Article 254 of the Constitution debars state assemblies from enacting laws contradicting legislation already passed by Parliament in Delhi. Therefore the high court’s order that West Bengal’s PTTIs are “invalid” remains in force.
In the general election of May this year the number of Lok Sabha seats won by the CPM, which has ruled in West Bengal (pop. 80 million) since 1977, fell to a mere 16 from 42. Therefore the CPM is desperate to recover lost ground in its bastion in the state assembly elections scheduled for May 2011. And given that primary school teachers are important because they influence village panchayat voters, the PTTI fiasco is bad news for the Left Front parties. “The situation has become a little complicated. I will go through the entire judgement and consult legal experts and then comment on the issue,” says education minister Partha De.
Quite clearly the pressure on the Left Front alliance parties to find a solution to the impasse in West Bengal’s primary education is building up. But no easy solutions are in sight.
Sujoy Gupta (Kolkata)