The fight is for life and livelihood, which have been violated, a teacher wrote on a poster sitting at Esplanade’s Y-channel on Monday afternoon.

While she wrote, another teacher held an umbrella to shield her from the scorching sun.

Teachers and non-teaching staff of government-aided schools, rendered jobless by a Supreme Court verdict on April 3, are turning to each other for support and preparing for a long haul under the open sky. They shifted their protest from the road in front of the school service commission office in Salt Lake to the Y-channel on Saturday night.

Some carried foam sheets to sit on, instead of newspapers, to make the heat from the ground more bearable.

Metro spoke to three teachers.

Debprasad Roy, 33

Debprasad Roy and his family were supposed to move to their new house in Barasat on the “auspicious day of Poila Boishakh”.

But now the dream has become uncertain.

Roy has cancelled the grihapravesh ceremony to shift to the new house and is instead waiting at the Y-channel for a “favourable decision”.

He took a loan of ₹27 lakh in 2019, a few months after he joined Barajaguli Gopal Academy Higher Secondary School in Nadia as a mathematics teacher. He taught students in Classes IX and X.

Roy bought a plot of
land and started building a house. While the house was being built, Roy and his
wife, children and parents shifted to a rented apartment in Barasat.

“If there is no favourable decision, I will have no money to pay the ₹25,000 EMI each month. I can’t move to the new house because if I can’t pay, I can be evicted by the bank,” said Roy. He has a five-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son.

Roy’s father used to sell fish in the local market, which he had discontinued after his son got the teaching job.

“I had asked him to discontinue... But last week I saw him preparing to go and sell fish again. If I don’t earn, someone else has to run the family, said the postgraduate in mathematics.

Sangita Saha, 38

Sangita Saha’s 10-year-old daughter came to see her off as she boarded the bus for Delhi on Monday.

“My daughter is my strength and not my weakness. She knows what I am going through and has been by my side all this while,” Saha told Metro before the bus set off at 1.50pm.

Saha used to teach computer science to Classes XI and XII at Sri Krishnapur High School in Kharagpur.

She has been part of the protest since it was outside the office of the school service commission in Salt Lake on April 9.

A postgraduate in computer applications from Vidyasagar University, Midnapore, Saha has been out on the streets, braving the heat, sleeping under the sky, with a firm resolve to get her job back.

It was only on Sunday that she travelled home to East Midnapore to fetch some things she needed to travel to Delhi.

“We have to make this a national movement so people see how deserving teachers like us are suffering. We don’t have sponsors helping us, but have arranged for funds from our savings to go to Delhi,” she said.

Aparajita Panda, 32

More than half of Aparajita Panda’s salary goes towards the treatment of her mother’s ovarian cancer. She has been funding the treatment for the last three years.

Her mother has to take a pill twice a day, which comes to ₹41,000 a month. “It is an oral chemotherapy pill, which was given to my mother after the cancer relapsed in 2022. I considered myself lucky that I could pay for treatment because of my job. But what now?”

Panda taught Sanskrit to Classes XI and XII at Naihati Narendra Vidyaniketan.

“We took the exam nine years ago when we were fresh graduates. Now, with family and home responsibilities, I cannot devote my time and attention to prepare for an exam.”