New Delhi: After seeking legal opinion on University Grants Commission’s directive on SC, ST and OBC faculty quota, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has decided to file a Special Leave Petition (SLP) in the Supreme Court against the decision by the Allahabad High Court.
On April 7, 2017 Allahabad High Court had allowed a plea which challenged an advertisement brought out by Banaras Hindu University (BHU), seeking to quash the clauses that assured reservation of SCs, STs and OBCs in teaching faculty.
The court ruled, “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.”
After the directive became public, the Parliamentary Committee on the Welfare of Schedule Castes and Schedule Tribes made recommendations to form an inter-ministerial committee and re-look at the UGC's directive that tweaks quota policy. The government received their recommendations and has decided to file an SLP in the apex court, seeking a relook at the order.
The inter-ministerial committee of officials from the Law Ministry, UGC, Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry and DoPT and was headed by UGC chairperson DP Singh. The committee had advised the government to rethink the new directive and seek legal opinion because the “quantum of SC/ST/OBC teachers would be adversely affected under the new formula”.
The committee debated over the issue and found consensus in continuing with the system of implementing reservations on the basis of the institution as a whole rather than newer regulation that calls for reservation of the SC/STs on the basis of taking the department as a whole.
In October 2017, UGC issued a directive which directly affected the recruitment of SC/ST/OBC teachers. It found opposition from within the government. Recently, the Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Thawar Chand Gehlot asked HRD minster Prakash Javadekar for a rollback of the policy.
Gehlot said in the letter that the government was duty-bound to ensure proper representation of marginalized sections in teaching position and that the circular contradicts constitutional provisions.
The new notification has the potential to dent efforts that ensure SC/ST/OBC categories in getting 15%, 7.5% and 27% jobs, respectively as per the constitutional provision. Under the earlier reservation roster, when the university was taken as unit, the SC/ST/OBC got reservations to some extent. But with the new roster, according to which the reservations will consider the department as a unit, there will be a decline in the number of SC/ST/OBCs as professors, assistant professors and so on.
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