Supreme Court rejects West Bengal madrasa teachers’ plea for regularisation, benefits

Origins of dispute

The dispute has its origins in petitions concerning the validity of the provisions of the West Bengal Madrasah Service Commission Act, 2008, which established a statutory commission to recommend the appointment of teachers in aided madrasas. It stripped local madrasa managing committees of their traditional power to appoint teachers independently.

A single-judge bench of the Calcutta High Court struck down the Act in 2014, and a division bench upheld this a year later, in 2015. The High Court declared the Act unconstitutional, holding that it was violative of Article 30 of the Constitution, which provides that all minorities shall have the right to establish and administer educational institutions of their choice.

In January 2020, however, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional validity of the 2008 Act. In February 2023, the Supreme Court set up a committee to examine the validity of appointments made after the High Court’s 2015 decision holding the Act unconstitutional and its own January 2020 order upholding it.

The committee found the appointments invalid, but hundreds of staff members hired outside the commission’s framework during the years of legal limbo challenged the decision in the Supreme Court.