The Patna high court on Tuesday stayed the appointment of assistant professors being carried out by the Bihar State University Service Commission (BSUSC) amid the government’s failure in showing the method and manner of invoking reservations.
The court directed the commission not to make any appointments until further notice as the state government could not give satisfactory clarification.
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BSUSC had on September 23, 2020, advertised 4,638 vacancies of assistant professors in 52 subjects just ahead of the announcement of state assembly elections. However, soon after the statute for the appointment was notified, it had to be amended on the intervention of chief minister Nitish Kumar to give weightage to candidates from Bihar.
A single bench of justice Sanjeev Prakash Sharma gave the order on Tuesday after hearing petitions filed by Dr Amod Prabodhi and others.
Appearing for the petitioner, senior advocate PK Shahi said that the state has been asked to furnish details of the reservation roster applied for appointment. The next date for a hearing in the case is January 10, he said.
HC bench of justice Sharma had on November 29 directed the state to keep ready the entire method and manner in which they had made backlog reservations and requisition to the commission for various posts.
Shahi said the bench stayed appointments after the government could not give any satisfactory reply to the pointed queries of the court and sought time yet again.
“I pleaded that out of the total vacancies (4639), just around 1,200 are open seats, which comes to approx 20%. Which category does the rest 80% belong to?” Shahi told the HC while appearing for the petitioners stating that the requisition for backlog and reservation should be sent prior to the commencement of the appointment process.
He said, at the time of the hearing, director (higher education) Rekha Kumari was present in the court, but according to her, the education department had no role in it and passed the buck to universities. The university registrars have on the other hand shifted the responsibility to the department.
Shahi told the HC that there was no calculation done by the state of the backlog status, as during previous recruitment also around 20% of seats were kept vacant in anticipation of the unknown magnitude of the backlog. “This is not the way. The case was filed in November 2020, more than seven months before the interview process got underway. Yet, the government kept fully dallying,” he said.
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“The court accepted my request to stay the appointment until records were produced,” he added.
BSUSC chairman Rajvardhan Azad said the court has stayed the appointments, but not the selection process. He said the commission will continue with its process and the department will clear appointments subject to the court order.
“We have already completed interviews for 29 of the 52 subjects and sent the recommendations to the government. The confusion over roster is for the universities and the department to look into,” he added.
However, with the ambiguity on the reservation roster applied for appointments, the process is again set to get delayed. The BPSC in 2014 advertised 3,364 vacancies, nearly 17 years after the previous advertisement in 1997, and the interview process got underway in 2015 and stretched until 2020 before the commission was revived.
Bihar legislature 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, the Bihar government constituted the commission in February 2019 with Rajvardhan Azad as the chairman.