By Siddhant Mohan, TwoCircles.net
The administration at Banaras Hindu University is at the centre of controversy after allegedly defying the reservation rules in appointments of teaching staff in University. Various groups have come forward after seeing BHU’s stubborn response to the Allahabad Court’s orders.
The University put out a recruitment notification for the academic year 2016-17 inviting applications for the posts of Professor, Assistant Professor and Associate professor. As soon the notification came out, students and University’s teachers realised that administration was ignoring the reservation guidelines.
According to the guidelines, institutes and universities should apply reservations quota on seats in every department of every faculty separately. But instead, the BHU administration clubbed all the vacant seats present in every department and then applied the reservation quota over all clubbed seats.
For example, the post of Assistant Professor had a total 1,139 seats, out of which 225 seats were vacant. University clubbed these 225 vacant seats of Assistant Professor together. Similarly, it clubbed all 191 vacant seats of Associate Professor and 116 vacant seats for the post of Professor together.
BHU’s decision of applying reservation on clubbed seats, rather than doing it on seats of separate departments, has raised many eyebrows. Students and teachers have alleged that University has taken this measure for accommodating upper-caste applicants on ‘better’ posts.
By ‘better’ posts, the students mean that through the application of reservation on clubbed seats, University has the liberty of allocating reserved seats according to its wish. One of the University’s research scholars, in a conversation with TwoCircles.net, said, “Now University can fill few particular faculties or departments with upper caste teachers, and dump OBCs, SCs, and STs in other inferior ones.”
“If University would have followed the guidelines, every department would have the representation as per the law,” the scholar added.
On April 7, 2017, Allahabad High Court ordered the university to apply department-wise reservation through a fresh roster and asked UGC to form guidelines. But BHU has found a camouflage after the new order. It issued a new roster on April 10, just three days after the court’s order.
To make matters worse, the University administration did not put the new appointment roster online. And when few applicants from the lower caste asked for the roster through RTI application, their requests were denied.
So, technically, the University is complying with the court’s order but is refusing to make the reservation status public.
University professor Mahesh Prasad Ahirwar and few other teachers met vice-chancellor and registrar of BHU over the issue. VC Tripathi assured Ahirwar and other teachers of appropriate action, but nothing happened.
Ahirwar wrote a letter to Prakash Javdekar, HRD Minister of India. In the letter, Ahirwar has said, “The faculty appointments being made in BHU overnight are illegal and impractical. It will create a problem to applicants and appointees in future.”
Ahirwar pointed out that the steps which BHU is taking are directly against the UGC guidelines. Ahirwar also wrote to SC-ST commission, OBC commission, the parliamentary committee, and other constitutional bodies but he has received no substantial reply so far.
However, scholar and applicants from Schedule Castes and Schedule Tribes have accused university’s VC Prof GC Tripathi of bias against lower castes. There are allegations against Tripathi that he wants to fill seats as per his own wish before his tenure which will be completed in November.
To fill seats with upper caste students, BHU administration has appointed people who have no essential qualification for the post. This is similar to what happened in the Institute of Medical Science, BHU, when diploma holders were appointed on the posts of Assistant Professor. Not only the upper caste applicants were issued joining letter in a day or two, but they were asked to join on the same day.
There is one more glitch towards which Ahirwar points out. According to Ahirwar, the reservation cannot be applied just on vacant seats. He insists that reservation is applicable on all the filled and vacant seats. But BHU administration has applied reservation on vacant seats, which has made the representation of SC, ST or OBC students fairly low among the teachers.
For example, out of 1,139 posts of Assistant Professors, there are only 139 posts reserved for SCs and only 52 posts are reserved for STs. This happened because, excluding previous appointments, the reservation was applied on vacant 255 seats. It raised representation of general candidates far more than 51 percent, which is against the reservation rules.
Commenting on this, Ahirwar said, “All these vacant seats now belong to reserved categories. But the university is trying to appoint general candidates on those as well.”
The posts of junior resident doctor and senior resident doctor at IMS-BHU were also diluted to such an extent that all 22 posts of junior residents now belong to general category. But according to the rules, it should have six seats for OBCs, four seats for SCs and two seats for STs.
The same happened on 67 seats of senior residents where STs were not given any seats, while OBCs were given seven seats and two seats were given to SCs.
However, BHU administration is denying that it is doing anything against the law. While talking to various media houses in recent times, University PRO Rajesh Singh has labelled those who are raising questions of “doing caste politics”. Despite repeated attempts, he did not respond to the calls from this correspondent.