SC rejects plea against dept-wise quota for teachers

The Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a plea by the Centre and the UGC to reconsider the January 22 order on treating a particular department in universities as a unit for reserving teachers posts.

The issue has rocked Parliament in the last session, forcing the government to file review petitions as it was contended by all political parties that providing reservation taking each department of varsities as a unit would deprive OBCs, SCs and STs lose their shares.

On Wednesday, a bench of Justices U U Lalit and Indira Banerjee said, "We have gone through the review petitions and do not find any error apparent on record to justify interference in review jurisdiction."

The bench also pointed out that the grounds in the review petitions were also raised and gone into when the special leave petitions were considered by this court.

The court had on January 22 declined to intervene into a 2017 Allahabad High Court judgement which had quashed a UGC guideline treating a central university as a unit for granting reservation in teaching posts.

It had upheld the HC's judgement, delivered on April 7, 2017, directing for considering a particular department as a unit for reserving teaching posts instead of the university.

"The decision rendered by the HC was (then) found to be correct and the special leave petitions were dismissed. The court also noted that similar challenge raised on behalf of certain individual petitioners had also been rejected earlier," the bench said in its order on Wednesday.

"Taking totality of the circumstances, the submissions raised by the University Grants Commission and the Union of India were not accepted and the petitions were dismissed," the bench added.

The court also rejected a plea by the UGC and the Union government for an open court hearing in the matter.

The high court had then quashed the guidelines framed by the UGC and circulated on August 25, 2006 and on February 19, 2008.

“If the University is taken as a 'Unit' for every level of teaching and applying the roster it could result into some departments/subjects having all reserved candidates and some having only unreserved candidates. Such proposition again would be discriminatory and unreasonable. This again would be violative of Article 14 and 16 of the Constitution,” it had held.