Stop deploying teachers for recruitment process: Bihar chief secy to districts

PATNA: Bihar chief secretary Amit Subhani has told the state’s district magistrates (DMs) to stop deploying teachers and education department staffers for verification of documents related to the recruitment of teachers by public service recruiter Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC).

Subhani’s move to red-flag the deployment of teachers was in line with objections raised by the education department earlier.

BPSC has responded to the missive from the state’s top bureaucrat and issued instructions to pause the verification of documents of candidates.

In his September 6 letter to the DMs, Subhani said: “At present, the education department is carrying out a statewide drive to strengthen the government school system and daily monitoring, in which all the officials and teachers are engaged. Therefore, the education department officials and teachers need to be kept away from the work of verification and scanning of OMR answer sheets so that they could remain engaged with education”.

The education department had also pointed out earlier that it was not against the recruitment rules to deploy teachers during the process of recruiting 170,000 teachers in the state.

BPSC conducted Bihar’s biggest school teacher recruitment examination for 1,70,461 school teacher posts from August 24 to August 26. More than 800,000 aspirants appeared in the examination at 870 centres across the state. The document verification process of the candidates has been going on since September 5 and was expected to continue till September 12.

In its letter on Tuesday, the education department told BPSC that the engagement of education department officials and teachers was “neither acceptable nor in the interest of education”.

The department also faulted the BPSC decision to conduct the verification at this stage. It said the verification of documents needs to be done prior to issuing appointment letters. “Therefore, there is no logic to deploy officials and teachers for document verification in all the districts in contravention to the rules, without the recommendation of successful candidates,” the department said.

BPSC plans to announce the results later this month.