The Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed the plea raised by the University Grants Commission which stated to reconsider the order passed on January 22, initially passed by Allahabad High Court, for department-wise recruitment of reserved faculty positions instead of calculating by considering universities or colleges as a unit.
The apex court also refused to conduct an open court hearing of the Center’s review petition. The Judges namely U U Lalit and Indira Bannerjee dismissed the review petitions filed by UGC.
“We have gone through the review petitions and do not find any error apparent on record to justify interference in review jurisdiction.” said bench of Justices U U Lalit and Indira Bannerjee
The Last Parliament session witnessed various review petitions to be filed as all the political parties asserted that departmental wise recruitment for reserved faculty positions will make OBCs, SCs, and STs lose their shares.
The Supreme Court approved of the HC’s order passed on April 7, 2017, seeking department-wise recruitment of reserved faculty positions instead of treating central university as a unit.
“The respondent university will carry out the exercise of applying reservation to the posts under advertisement treating the department/subject as a unit for all levels of teachers rather than treating the university as a unit,” the High Court had said.
“The decision rendered by the HC was (then) found to be correct and the special leave petitions were dismissed. The court also noted that similar challenge raised on behalf of certain individual petitioners had also been rejected earlier,” the bench confirmed in its order on Wednesday.
“Taking totality of the circumstances, the submissions raised by the University Grants Commission and the Union of India were not accepted and the petitions were dismissed,” the bench added.
“If the University is taken as a ‘Unit’ for every level of teaching and applying the roster it could result in some departments/subjects having all reserved candidates and some having only unreserved candidates. Such a proposition again would be discriminatory and unreasonable. This again would be violative of Article 14 and 16 of the Constitution,” it had held.