Punjab terminates the services of 253 Master Cadre teachers

Punjab's Education Department has terminated the services of 253 Master Cadre teachers. According to a report in Punjabi Jagran, the teachers had been protesting for ten days at Gambhirpur, the village of Education Minister Harjot Singh Bains, when the order was issued.

How the dispute reached this point

The report sets out the following sequence. The Master Cadre recruitment examination was held in August 2022 and the result was declared in December 2022 by NIELIT. In January 2023, Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann handed appointment letters to the selected candidates.

Errors in the answer key were then challenged in the High Court. Following the court's directions, subject experts from Guru Nanak Dev University and other universities prepared a revised answer key. A fresh selection list was drawn up on that basis and the teachers were posted to schools in May 2023, where the two teachers quoted in the report say they have served for about three and a half years.

The teachers allege that the revised answer key was cancelled after three years and the earlier NIELIT key restored. Show-cause notices followed in May 2026, and on 28 October orders were issued terminating their services.

What both sides say

The teachers argue that they were appointed through a process the courts themselves shaped, that they have taught in government schools for three and a half years, and that they should not lose their livelihoods over an answer key they had no hand in preparing.

The case for the department is that a selection list has to rest on a valid answer key, and that appointments made on a key later set aside cannot simply be left standing — candidates who would have qualified on the correct key were kept out of those posts.

The Democratic Teachers Front and the Government Teachers Union have both condemned the decision and warned that the protest will widen across Punjab if the teachers are not given what they regard as justice.

Why we are asking

Decisions like this one set the terms for every government recruitment that follows — how secure an appointment really is, and what happens when the process that produced it is later found to be flawed. That makes it worth knowing what job seekers themselves think.