It’s an indicator of the magnitude of the scale of educated unemployed in the eastern seaboard state of West Bengal (pop. 91 million), where too few jobs were created during 34 years of uninterrupted rule of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (1977-2011) because of a prolonged private investment famine and flight of capital. The Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) 2015 in West Bengal is becoming increasingly difficult to administer because of the huge numbers aspiring for teaching jobs. For a start, not expecting a ten-fold increase in applicants (from 365,000 in 2014 to 2.3 million this year), the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) didn’t print enough forms leading to a scramble for TET application forms, with crowds ransacking the branches of several nationalised banks on July 5. Subsequently WBBPE, which conducts the exam within the framework of the NCTE (National Council for Teacher Education), was forced to cancel TET 2015 scheduled for August 30, with the mysterious disappearance of a bundle of question papers in transit from Salt Lake to Hooghly forcing the board to reschedule the exam for October 11.

But the October 11 TET didn’t go off smoothly either following reports of the question paper being leaked an hour prior to the test. According to media reports, pictures of the solved answer sheets were circulated on WhatsApp an hour before the exam. Nevertheless, TET 2015 was finally written by 2.3 million graduates in 5,200 centres statewide competing for 30,000 teachers’ jobs — 76 applicants for each vacancy — in the state’s 75,141 primary schools.

Reports of the TET exam papers leak yet again, have prompted the state’s opposition parties to launch a scathing attack on chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s TMC government which is already firefighting the Sharada chit fund scam among a host of other corruption scandals. Calling for Banerjee’s resignation, BJP leader Rahul Sinha demanded cancellation and rescheduling TET 2015, and a CBI enquiry into the incident. However, according to TMC government spokespersons, there wasn’t any leak of the October 11 exam papers. While education minister Partha Chatterjee refrained from making a comment, Manik Bhattacharya, chairman of WBBPE told mediapersons: “No question paper was leaked. It was a picture sent by a person and received by another. Both must be arrested. It’s a crime. It’s a cyber crime.”

This is hardly the first TET in jobs-starved West Bengal where a primary teacher’s job paying Rs.15,000 per month is highly prized, has been marred by controversy. In 2012, TET admission cards printed by WBBPE were riddled with errors and many eligible candidates were denied entrance into exam halls. The following year, a huge row erupted about allegedly tampered results of TET 2013 with charges that the list of successful TET candidates was “analysed” in Trinamool Bhavan, headquarters of the ruling TMC party in central Kolkata, prior to official publication. Yet despite such charges, the percentage of graduates clearing TET has ranged from a pathetic 1-1.07 percent.

West Bengal’s academics — most of them appointed during CPM rule — believe that large-scale corruption and mismanagement of TETs is aided and abetted by the state government. “There is something fishy about TET 2015 and a big corruption scandal is waiting to be unearthed. Some media reports allege that even as results are awaited, teacher appointments have already been made for government schools at Howrah, Burdwan and Coochbehar districts. It’s all pre-planned and there’s a conspiracy to inject TMC sympathisers into West Bengal’s government schools. The TMC government is least bothered about the future of students,” alleges Pabitra Sarkar, former vice chancellor, Rabindra Bharati University, and former vice chairman, West Bengal State Council of Higher Education.

Adding further discomfort to the state government, the Delhi-based National Council for Teacher Education has made B.Ed compulsory for candidates writing teachers’ recruitment tests countrywide. Mamata Banerjee wanted to fill the 17,000 teacher vacancies for classes IX-X of government schools before the state goes to the assembly polls next year. But the NCTE directive has made it difficult to meet this target, even though there’s an acute shortage of trained teachers in the state, especially for science subjects. However, according to the state education ministry, B.Ed was made compulsory for recruiting primary school teachers in the CPM-era. But shortly after the BJP-led NDA government was swept to power in New Delhi in 2014, Union human resource development minister, Smriti Irani, allowed non B.Ed candidates to write TET in West Bengal. The state government is hopeful of such an exemption again to fill government primary school vacancies, the quality of education provided by incompetent teachers be damned.

Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)