TET disaster

There was a hollow ring to Mamata Banerjee’s bluster that it would "take a minute" to strike down the "CPI-M’s challenge". As it turned out, the rhetorical flourish at the Chhatra Parishad foundation day was advanced in parallel with the "breaking news" that a packet containing question papers for the Teachers’ Eligibility Test had been reported missing in transit from the Council’s office in Salt Lake to the Treasury in Serampore. The initial hedging by Partha Chatterjee has now been replaced with a measure of seriousness of purpose. Forty-eight hours after the inexcusable lapse was exposed and after the minister was reportedly pulled up by his Chief , the government has commissioned a CID inquiry.

Whether or not India Post was responsible need not detain us; the finding must await a thorough investigation. Miss Banerjee is said to have taken umbrage at Mr Chatterjee’s off-the-cuff allegation against the Department of Posts. It did not behove the minister to jump to the conclusion in the immediate aftermath of the exposure, indeed to cover the tracks of his bumbling department. Direly distressing must be the reality that TET has been reduced to a fiasco with at least four facets to the mess over the past three years – the overwhelming chaos in terms of logistics; the appointment of Trinamul activists who had failed; the controversy over the eligibility of untrained candidates; and now the disappearance of question-paper packets two days before the exam.

Overall, the conduct of the exam marks a mockery of the Chief Minister’s oft-repeated pledge that 15,000 school teachers will soon be appointed. One scandal has reinforced the previous, and overall this is testament to the progressive decadence of education – from the primary to the university level. The preposterous teacher-student ratio in the primary segment is merely a symptom of the malaise, let alone the other loopholes that have scarcely been addressed.

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Of course, a fresh date for the exam will now have to be scheduled. Here too, the education department has tied itself up in knots, provoking the Home department to virtually turn down its suggestion with the stricture that it ought to have been consulted.

Whenever the fresh date is finalised, the most senior levels of the bureaucracy are bamboozled that 4 October was fixed by the education department as the alternative, specifically a day after the elections in several municipalities and gram panchayats. The administrative bungling would have been laughable were it not for the profound implications in terms of primary education and employment generation. The loser is the candidate in search of a primary teacher’s job.

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