12 Dec : The West Bengal govt has sought Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s intervention over the issue of nearly 75,000 trained candidates of Primary Teachers Training Institutes, whose fate hangs in balance with the Calcutta High Court declaring PTTI unaffiliated and their certificates void.
"Unless we find a solution to the problem quickly, the situation involving the future of thousands of students will become explosive," Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee said in a letter to the PM .
In his letter Bhattacharjee pointed out that the the training of primary teachers were conducted under Primary Education Act and Rules.While the NCTE Act was promulgated in 1995, the training institutes of the state ran as usual.
There was, however, a PIL against this and a division bench of the Calcutta High Court declared such training centres in the state as unaffiliated and certificates given by them as void, the letter said.
Stating that the high court order had put the future of 75,000 trained candidates in jeopardy, it said nearly 40,000 of them were already engaged as primary teachers with 20,000 waiting for their selection as primary teachers and 15,000 yet to receive their certificates even after completing the course.
The state government had also requested HRD minister Arjun Singh to bring an appropriate legislation in validating the course upto 2005-06, the letter said.