The decision of the Bihar School Examination Board (BSEB) to cancel the secondary teachers’ eligibility test (STET) on Saturday on the basis of the recommendation of a committee more than three-and-half months after it was conducted and later re-conducted at some centres came barely six days before the matter was to come up for hearing before the Patna High Court.
On May 12, after the board took a stand before the court that the results would not be published for the next 15 days, the bench of Justice Ahsanuddin Amanullah had fixed May 22 as the next date of hearing, with a clear observation: “If for any reason the matter is not heard by the court on the next appointed date, the court expects that the board would not precipitate matters by publishing the results.”
While hearing the writ petition filed by 35 applicants alleging out of syllabus questions and malpractices, the court, however, made it clear that in the meantime “the board is not precluded from proceedings with the evaluation of the answer sheets”.
The observation of the court, making a cap on publication of results, came after Dinu Kumar and Ritika Rani, counsels for the petitioner Neeraj Kumar, raised apprehension that the board might go ahead and publish the results if the matter was not heard on May 22 due to any reason. The petition was filed after it came to be known that the board could publish the STET results by May 15. Dinu Kumar said there was no mention by the board’s counsel of any inquiry being conducted in the matter before the court on May 12.
“The court was never informed if any committee was investigating the matter and when was it constituted. The only thing the board’s counsel submitted before the court, which is part of the order, was that the advocate general, Lalit Kishor, would appear for the board and sought adjournment,” he added.
Board chairman Anand Kishor could not be contacted on his mobile phone.
The STET exam was conducted on January 28, 2020 at 317 centres across the state. It was an examination for eligibility of teachers to be recruited in higher and higher secondary schools and the candidates had to wait eight years for it.
The first STET was conducted in 2011 and despite huge shortage of teachers in higher and higher secondary, it kept getting delayed. Nearly 2.47 lakh candidates had taken the STET-2019 exam held on January 28.
The Bihar board in a communique on Sunday said that no fee would be charged from candidates for the re-test, nor would they be required to apply afresh. “The candidates would be apprised of the fresh date as soon as it is decided,” said the statement.
RJD Rajya Sabha MP Manoj Jha, however, tweeted it was a clear example of “how easy it was for the authorities to kill the dreams of the unemployed youth”. “Take exams after years of wait, then comes institutional leakage and finally cancellation. Coronavirus seems to have given birth to many new viruses and this decision is just one of them,” he added.
