Bihar notified TRE 4. The Patna sit-in is still on day seven.
The teacher exam was the first demand. Gardanibagh now has a 13-point list, and a hunger-strike threat.
The Bihar government put out the Teacher Recruitment Examination 4 notification within hours of a sit-in starting in Patna last week. The protest did not end.
Sunday is day seven at Gardanibagh, a short walk from the Secretariat and the Assembly. Students call it the Chhatra Nyay Satyagraha. Turnout has grown over the last two days as groups from across the state have joined.
TRE 4 had sat unpublished for nearly two years. About 1.5 million teacher aspirants wanted it. The advertisement covers 32,388 posts. Protester Shahbaz Ansari said the wait for the notice is over, and that the test now has to be run as cleanly as TRE 2 and TRE 3.
That is no longer the whole brief. Aspirants have tabled 13 demands and five extra conditions. They want no negative marking, a single-stage paper, a hard domicile preference for Bihar natives, an anti-leak law, blacklisting of tainted vendors, age relaxation, pending BSSC results, librarian ads, police SI and constable notifications, TRE 1 to 3 supplementary lists, UGC 2018 rules for guest teachers, more seats, and FIRs against student protesters withdrawn.
The five add-ons include a one candidate, one result rule, carbon copies of OMR sheets, Hindi-medium parity in BPSC mains, an end to contract-worker bonus marks, and a threat: written assurances, or an indefinite hunger strike and an Assembly gherao.
A delegation led by Dileep Kumar met Governor Syed Ata Hasnain on Saturday. The Governor said he would take the list to officials. The camp wants that on the government website, not as a verbal note.
A few metres away, PhD scholars and guest teachers have been under a tent for more than two weeks. Kumud Patel has been on hunger strike for 17 days. They want UGC Regulation 2018 for assistant professor posts.
Leader of the Opposition Tejashwi Yadav, CPI leaders and AISA have visited. Tejashwi's RJD also marched toward Lok Bhawan on 19 August over joblessness and the alleged AK-47 firing at students in Siwan on 25 July. Police later told the Supreme Court a constable fired four rounds in the air.
Issuing TRE 4 was meant to take the air out of the protest. It did the opposite. Once the notice landed, the camp widened the fight to every stalled exam in the state.
Bihar has lived with paper leaks and delayed recruitments for years. Gardanibagh is where those files have a crowd again. A verbal word from Raj Bhavan will not move people who already waited two years for one advertisement.
The political traffic is the other half. Tejashwi on the street, AISA on site, a BJP chief minister in the Secretariat: this is now a jobs story that parties can pick up, or trip over.
Watch for a written government note, or the hunger strike they have promised. Watch whether TRE 4's pattern actually drops negative marking and stays single-stage. The sit-in has already outlived the demand that started it.