Agartala: With the crucial 2023 assembly elections drawing near, regular protests by job aspirants from different disciplines, seeking early recruitment drives have apparently pushed the Tripura government on the back foot.
Protests, demonstrations, and sit-ins in front of directorates of education, manpower planning and other departments have now become a regular sight and the silence maintained by senior party leaders and ministers on the issue of government jobs has only increased the intensity of the protests.
For Tripura, the state government has always been considered to be the major employer as it is yet to have a flourishing private sector that could offer jobs on a large scale. Naturally, a government job is seen as a key to social and financial security for not only the employee, but for the whole family.
Although the government argues that it has given more jobs than the previous government compared to the time it has passed in power, job aspirants disagree.
Thousands of Teachers Eligibility Test (TET) qualified job aspirants are waiting for their call while around 80,000 candidates who had appeared in the Joint Recruitment Board of Tripura (JRBT) selection tests for Group C and Group D employees.
The 10,323 sacked teachers are also persistent in their protests to get their issues solved. Opposition parties, especially the Communist Party of India (Marxist), were quick to recognise the pulse of young minds and the state’s principal opposition party has already incorporated the issue of employment in its political course of action.
Over 3,600 job aspirants have qualified for the TET exams from 2020-2021. As per the guidelines of the National Council for Teachers Education (NCTE), to be eligible for a teacher’s job in government schools, one should complete the mandatory training of Bachelor of Education (BEd) or Diploma in Elementary Education (DelEd). Both degrees qualify one to appear in the TET exams and if the aspirant cracks the exam, the department based on its requirement inducts the qualified candidates.
The government-sponsored thousands of students under various welfare schemes to get BEd and DelEd degrees from private universities, apart from the government institutions in the state. In the last couple of years, many students pursued training either in government institutions or privately in colleges of West Bengal. But, recruitment fell short compared to the number of aspirants.
According to sources at the Teachers Recruitment Board, Tripura, more than 16,000 applicants appeared in the last TET exams, the number of aspirants greater than the seats.
Speaking on the issue, a leader of the TET passed candidates said, “Roughly we have 3,600 qualified candidates but the TRBT’s recent notification only sought 573 teachers. We have been protesting for months now. There was a sliver of hope when education minister Ratan Lal Nath said that before Durga Puja all TET-qualified teachers will be recruited phase-wise. But only 573 people are set to get appointments.”
“When we resumed our protests in front of the house of the education minister, he told us to meet the finance minister. We spoke to Deputy Chief Minister Jishnu Dev Varma, who had also given us a positive assurance that our issues would be resolved soon,” he added.
Biswajit Ghosh, one of the leading voices of the TET candidates said, “Hopefully the government will resolve our issues. We have met Chief Minister Manik Saha and apprised him of the hardships we are facing. Many TET-qualified aspirants are on the verge of losing their eligibility due to age issues. All the ministers have told us that the state Cabinet is considering this issue as a priority.”
“In the last meeting, the education minister assured us that the government would initiate steps to recruit all TET-qualified candidates en masse before Durga Puja, which is scheduled on October 2”, Ghosh told EastMojo.
JRBT aspirants, on the other hand, have an altogether different problem. Ranabir Saha, a member of Unemployed Youth Forum, the newly constituted body of JRBT aspirants, said that they are yet to understand as to what barred the board from declaring the results.
“We have been demanding the results for the past ten months. After the exams in July 2021, the department fell completely silent on the publication of results. We started our protests in December 2021. In February, the High Court issued a stay order on results as the conduct of exams was challenged in the court, but in August this year, the stay was withdrawn. Due to some unknown reasons, the results are not being published. For Group C a total 81,000 aspirants sit for the exams while for Group D the number of applicants is 42,000”, he told EastMojo.
He said that they met the Chairman of JRBT Swapna Saha, Director of the Manpower Planning department Aditi Majumder, and other officials. Nobody could give them a satisfactory answer. “Their answers give an impression that they themselves are reluctant to publish the results,” he said.
Exams were conducted for Group C and Group D employees after the formation of the Joint Recruitment Board. The state government also relaxed age restrictions so that 10,323 retrenched teachers could apply for the jobs.
A permanent solution for these teachers is nowhere in sight. The teachers lost their jobs owing to a Supreme Court judgement it found irregularities in the recruitment process. The teachers, after an extension of a few years on an ad hoc basis, were finally sacked in March 2020.
Kamal Dey, who leads the group of 10,323 teachers demanded, “The school education department should immediately allow us to rejoin services. The schools are running short of teachers. We filed an RTI application and in its reply, we saw that we are not terminated from service. We need our jobs back.” The teachers had been protesting in front of the directorate of education relentlessly waiting for a positive response. They were arrested on Thursday morning but were later released by the officials as the preventive detention period ended. The teachers again gathered in front of the Directorate Office.
Also read | No forced collection of subscriptions: Tripura CM to Puja organisers