• A stopover in Allahabad to distribute leaflets in English and Hindi, and tell people on the streets what made them head to Delhi’s Jantar Mantar.
• A break in Kanpur to interact with the head of an institution, share tales of torment they have encountered since being terminated en masse on April 3

Sacked and aggrieved teachers travelling to Delhi on a bus stopped at different places to sensitise people about what they were going through and build public opinion against what they said was an “unjust termination”.

They will hold a sit-in at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on Wednesday.

The 60 teachers told those they met on Allahabad Bypass how they had been sacked despite their names not featuring on the list of tainted candidates submitted by the CBI before the Supreme Court.

They told the head of a school in Kanpur’s Daula-tabad that the “unjust termination” had robbed them of their livelihood and dignity.

On Allahabad Bypass on Tuesday morning, when the teachers stopped at a roadside eatery to have tea, they started distributing leaflets in Hindi that summed up what they were fighting for.

The leaflet in English said: “We demand justice, untainted IX to XII teachers of West Bengal govt aided schools.”

In the leaflet, the Deserving Teachers’ Rights Forum, which is spearheading the movement, explained the percentage of alleged illegalities in the 2016 selection process detected by the CBI.

The leaflet said the illegality stood at 8.5 per cent at the secondary level and 14.47 per cent at the higher secondary level.

The percentage of teachers who had been legally recruited at the secondary and higher secondary levels stood at 91.5 per cent and 85.53 per cent, respectively, it said.

A division bench of the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna on April 3 revoked the jobs of 25,753 teaching and non-teaching staff at Bengal’s government-aided schools.

The apex court said the appointment process through which the tainted and those “not found to be specifically tainted” had been recruited was “vitiated”.

Sangita Sinha, among those distributing leaflets, said they arrived at the percentage figure based on an affidavit that the school service commission submitted before the Supreme Court in mid-February, based on the findings of the CBI.

“Through the leaflets, we wanted to tell people how we have been robbed of our rights and dignity. We wanted to raise public awareness, which could help us get justice,” said Sinha.

The leaflet said: “We taught students for more than six years... The high court and Supreme Court have terminated our services without doing any lawful segregation. We have our children and families to feed.”

The same content was written in Hindi.

The teachers focused their campaign in Uttar Pradesh, though the bus passed through Jharkhand, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh on its way to Delhi.

“The bus passed through Jharkhand and Bihar at night. So, we could not campaign in the two states. When we were in Uttar Pradesh it was daytime, so we could campaign there,” said Chinmoy Mandal, an aggrieved teacher on the bus.

In Kanpur, the teachers went to Hans Greenfield Public School, a CBSE-affiliated school.

“We met the principal there and requested her to distribute the leaflets among the teachers in her school. It was painful that on Poila Baisakh, instead of spending time with family, we had to do this,” said Mandal, who was an English teacher.

They will hold a sit-in at Jantar Mantar from 2pm to 5pm on Wednesday.