Agartala, October 15:
Hundreds of candidates who qualified in Tripura’s 2024 Teachers’ Eligibility Test-I (TET-1) staged a sit-in outside Shiksha Bhavan here, demanding immediate publication of the merit list and questioning why they were being made to suffer because of a pending legal dispute involving an earlier examination.
Carrying posters and placards bearing the slogan “Give us jobs or give us poison”, the candidates appealed to the Teachers’ Recruitment Board, Tripura (TRBT), and the state education department to expedite the recruitment process.
The protesters, many of whom were accompanied by their children, said they had qualified in the 2024 examination but even after more than passing of one-and-a-half years time of publication of the results they were still waiting for the merit list, even as both TET exams were held together but the merit list for TET-II candidates had been published and large number of them have already received their appointment letters.
They alleged that repeated assurances from the authorities had failed to resolve the issue, leaving them uncertain about their employment prospects.
The candidates argued that the legal dispute concerned the 2022 TET-I examination, in which questions were allegedly incorrect, and should not hold up the recruitment process for those who appeared in 2024.
They said the TRBT chairman had acknowledged that a question in the 2022 examination was incorrect, while maintaining that the corresponding question in the 2024 examination was not wrong but those who passed with the wrong question are already in the government jobs and now they are suffering unnecessarily because they have no connection to the 2022.
According to the protesters, a court judgment concerning the earlier dispute was delivered about two months ago, but the merit list for the 2024 candidates had still not been published.
“We have cleared the examination and have committed no mistake. Why should we suffer because of a case involving other candidates?” a protester said, urging the board to publish the list without further delay.
The candidates also questioned the decision to link their recruitment with the legal proceedings involving a nine number of candidates from the earlier examination. They suggested that posts linked to the dispute could be kept vacant while the remaining qualified candidates were allowed to proceed with recruitment.
Claiming that all 368 candidates had qualified in the 2024 TET-I examination and that over 1,000 posts were vacant, they urged the authorities to clarify the legal obstacles and provide a definite timeline for recruitment.
Some protesters, including women who had brought their young children to the demonstration, described the prolonged uncertainty as a severe personal and financial strain.
The agitation followed Chief Minister Manik Saha’s remarks that TET-1 appointments could not be made immediately because of the pending legal complications.
The candidates urged the authorities to distinguish their case from the earlier dispute, publish the merit list and initiate the recruitment process at the earliest.
