WBSSC Opens Applications for 8,477 Group C and D Non-Teaching Posts in West Bengal Schools

On Thursday, the West Bengal School Service Commission put out its recruitment notification for non-teaching staff in the state's schools: 8,477 posts across two grades. Applications will be received from November 3 to December 3, 2025, and this time selection will run through an examination.

The notification splits the vacancies unevenly. There are 2,989 posts in Group C and 5,488 in Group D. General category candidates must pay an application fee of Rs 400. Candidates from the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and differently-abled categories pay Rs 150. The notification also states that tainted and ineligible candidates will not be able to apply.

That last condition is the thread back to why this exam exists. On April 3, the Supreme Court annulled the appointments of about 26,000 teachers and non-teaching staff whose recruitment came out of the 2016 selection process. The court ordered fresh examinations and barred tainted and ineligible candidates from the 2016 panel from sitting for them. On August 30, in line with that order, the commission published a list of 1,806 tainted candidates who had obtained teaching jobs through the recruitment scam.

The scam itself has weighed on West Bengal politics for several years. Central investigation agencies arrested a number of people, among them former State Education Minister Partha Chatterjee, Trinamool MLA Jiban Krishna Saha and a large number of officers of the State Education Department. The allegations were of massive corruption: helping candidates get teaching jobs in exchange for money, including by manipulating OMR sheets.

The non-teaching notification follows a larger exercise last month. The commission held the State Level Selection Test, or SLST, in two rounds to recruit teachers for Classes 9 to 12. It was the first such test in nine years and covered 35,726 teaching posts: 23,212 for Classes 9 and 10, and 12,514 for Classes 11 and 12.

State Education Minister Bratya Basu announced the new notification in a post on his official X account. He described it as another step by the School Education Department, taken under the advice and active monitoring of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, for the employment of the state's job-seeking youth, and he extended his good wishes to those applying.

For the roughly 26,000 people who lost their appointments, the Supreme Court's order meant the loss of their jobs, and the fresh exams now stand as the route to filling those positions. What to watch is whether the Group C and D exam, like the SLST before it, proceeds cleanly given the history of arrests and manipulated records, and how the commission handles the exclusion of tainted candidates once applications close on December 3.