The dismissed school staff walked from Wellington Square to Esplanade’s Y-channel on Tuesday evening, holding aloft their mobile phones with flashlights switched on as a mark of protest.

The protesters carried posters that said: “Shubha? Nababarsha.”

Mehboob Mandal, a spokesperson for the Deserving Teachers’ Rights Forum that held the march, said: “The question mark was added because the large-scale termination of jobs has made the Bengali New Year unpleasant for us. We don’t know how we will survive in the coming months.”

On April 3, the Supreme Court terminated the jobs of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff in government-aided schools.

Many protesting teachers who walked carried posters that read “Punarbibechonar Halkhata (Reconsideration ledger).”

“The Bengali New Year heralds a new beginning with the Halkhata (to keep accounts of transactions). In our case, we are appealing to the Supreme Court to consider our demand to segregate the deserving from the undeserving,” said a former secondary school teacher.

The Supreme Court scrapped the jobs of the tainted and those “not found to be specifically tainted” on the ground that the entire recruitment process was “vitiated”.

Mehboob said the same court, however, only asked the tainted to return the salary they had drawn so far.

“If we have not been asked to return the salary, then why was our service terminated? It is in this context that we demanded that our case be reconsidered,” he said.

The aggrieved school staff are planning to file a review petition before the Supreme Court.

Invite to Sourav

Around the time the members of the forum were holding their march from Wellington, three members of another platform, United Jobless Forum (Chakrihara Oikyamancha), went to former cricketer Sourav Ganguly’s residence in Behala, claiming they wanted to invite him to take part in their rally to state secretariat Nabanna on April 21 over the impasse.

“We came to invite Dada (Ganguly) so he can be part of our march,” said a member of the Forum.

Police took the trio away.

Chinmoy Mandal, a member of the Deserving Teachers Forum who was on his way to Delhi, said: “We don’t have anything to do with the movement that was staged in front of Sourav Ganguly’s home.”