By Siddhant Mohan, TwoCircles.net
The farewell of Prof GC Tripathi from Banaras Hindu University, one of the most controversial vice-chancellors in its history, might have come as a relief for students but the same cannot be said for the teachers who were appointed during Tripathi’s tenure.
While hearing the writ petition number 55171/ 2017 on December 12, 2017, Allahabad High Court stated that the appointment of teaching staff at BHU shall be affected by the decision over the writ petition.
Petitioners Angad Singh and two others filed the petition against the BHU’s advertisement number 1/2017-18 citing that the rules of reservation roster were applied wrongly and appointments were done unethically. The petitioners also sought the cancellation of the appointments.
The advertisement in the question asked for the applications for 500 teaching positions, out of which more than 200 posts have been filled.
The Court also said that this petition raised the similar concern of another writ petition number 47962/2017 filed by Jagdish Verma and others. While hearing the Verma’s petition in October, the court ordered that selection and appointment pursuant to the impugned advertisements shall go on and be completed. But the court also pointed out that University had to mention that the appointments may get affected by the judgement of the writ petition.
However, when University raised the point that it had already distributed the appointment letters, Angad Singh asked the court to order University to inform the appointed candidates that if the advertisement 1/2017-18 gets cancelled after the judgement over his petition, the appointments may also be cancelled.
A few weeks agp, we reported how GC Tripathi’s farewell had raised the anxiety levels of those who were appointed during his tenure. In September, when the BHU campus was fuelled with the protest of the students over safety issues, GC Tripathi was allegedly holding meetings inside the University campus regarding the appointment process.
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 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.
BHU made the reservation roster on “tentative” basis – which is against DoPT guidelines – without following or consulting University Grant Commission. The result of the negligence of UGC was that the seats belonging to reserved categories shrunk to very less. Moreover, the University administration did not get the reservation roster approved by the academic council before applying it for the reservation, which is against the guidelines.
The SC, ST and OBC communities of the university have alleged that they or their faculty members were not consulted during preparation of roster, based on which the advertisement was issued.
With the interference from the Allahabad High Court, the hundreds of candidates appointed by GC Tripathi are breathing heavily. These appointments were in the question even at the time when GC Tripathi was in the power.