AGARTALA, January 21 (TIWN): To put a transparent process in course of candidate selection to make appointment at different levels of School Education department including Teacher Eligibility Test, the state government has decided to constitute a 5-member professional body as Teachers’ Recruitment Board. The board will comprise of chairman, member secretary and three members respectively.According to a order vide No.F.1 (1-50)-SE/E(NG)/2014, dated- January 17, 2015 undersigned by Additional Secretary PK Chakravarty, the Board shall be exercising powers throughout the state and its headquarters shall be established at the premises of SCERT in Agartala. The School Education Department would frame the other functional and administrative norms with the Teachers’ Recruitment Board time to time as per the guidelines of NCTE.

The main functions of the Board will be; maintaining records of the selection made by the Board by computerization and networking of recruitment activities to ensure transparency and accuracy, preparation of guidelines on the matter relating to the methods of selection of teachers as per requirement and selection of candidates and recommendation of names of selected candidates to the concerned authorities for appointment as Under Graduate, Graduate and Post Graduate teachers to the government and Govt. aided other schools including SSA Rajya Mission, RMSA/TTAADC.

It is worthy to mention here; in a landmark judgment, the High Court of Tripura had terminated services of 10,323 PGTs, GTs and UGTs recruited by the state government for manipulating the selection process on May 07, 2014 and asked the state government to arrange a fresh recruitment process by December 2014.

A division bench of the high court comprising Chief Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Swapan Chandra Das passed the order on a batch of 58 petitions filed by those who had failed to secure the jobs. The court also heard the views of the state government and the complainants before passing the judgment.

The Tripura government had recruited 1,100 post-graduate, 4,617 graduate, and 4,606 under-graduate teachers in the past three years and they are already in service.

However, Tripura Cabinet has decided to make Teacher Eligibility Test (TET) compulsory for teacher recruitment as per the National Council for Education and Training NCERT guidelines on December 30, last year.