PATNA: The Patna high court on Friday cancelled the advertisement for the ongoing appointment of assistant professors in Bihar’s seriously understaffed state universities, being carried out by the Bihar State University Service Commission (BSUSC) since July 15, 2021, on the ground that it was “not sustainable due to lack of clarity on reservation roster and backlog vacancies”.
This development means that the appointment process would once again get delayed, as it happened in the past. Bihar universities and colleges are grappling with huge shortage of teachers, with several departments running without any teacher or just one or two.
So far, the commission has completed interviews of nearly 29 of the 52 subjects. The order has come at a time when interview process for subjects having larger number of candidates was to commence, said a commission official.
Hearing a petition by Dr Amod Prabodhi, HC bench of Justice Sanjeev Prakash Sharma, however, gave relief to the already appointed assistant professors on the condition that they would be adjusted against backlog vacancies once the roster is prepared in accordance with the laid down provisions. This would mean the posts would have to be advertised afresh. “The way reservation has been fixed for backlog vacancies is not sustainable at present,” he added.
The full order today is yet to be uploaded on the HC website .
Earlier, in December, 2022, the bench had stayed the appointments due to ambiguity on reservation roster and backlog, as the state government could not give satisfactory clarification. The present Advocate General, PK Shahi, who is also the former education minister, had then appeared for the petitioner and had strongly argued about the anomalies in preparing the reservation roster on the pretext that only 20% of the total seats were in the open category while there was no clarity on the rest 80%. “The requisition for backlog and reservation should have been sent prior to the commencement of the appointment process. There was no clearly on calculation prior to sending the requisition to the commission,” Shahi had then said.
The court had asked the state government to furnish details of the reservation roster applied for appointment with backlog position, with full details of the entire method and manner in which they had gone about it and sent requisition to the commission for various posts.
“The record is required to be seen as to how the requisition was sent to the Commission at the relevant point of time mentioning backlog vacancies which go to almost 3/4th of the total number of vacancies,” the bench observed.
While the education department said it had no role in it and passed the buck on universities, who in turn shifted the responsibility on the department. The petitioner contended that last time also around 20% seats were kept vacant in anticipation of unknown magnitude of backlog.
The case was filed in November 2020, more than seven months before the interview process got underway.
BSUSC had advertised 4,638 vacancies of assistant professors in 52 subjects on September 23, 2020, just ahead of the announcement of state assembly elections that year. However, soon after the statute for appointment was notified, it had to be amended on the intervention of chief minister Nitish Kumar to give weightage to candidates from Bihar following opposition from many quarters. Bihar legislature had passed the Bihar State University Service Commission Act in 2017 to vest the power of recruitment back in the commission, which was earlier dissolved in 2007. Ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, Bihar government had constituted the commission in February 2019 with Rajvardhan Azad as the chairman.
Last time, the Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) had advertised 3,364 vacancies in 2014, nearly 17 years after the previous advertisement in 1997, and the interview process got underway in 2015 and stretched up to 2020 before the Commission was revived.