IT News
Imphal, Mar 2:
Manipur University’s recent notification for the recruitment of faculty members has violated the Supreme Court ruling on the reservation of posts in recruitment.
In a recent notification for the recruitment of faculty members in Manipur University dated February 23, 2024, advertisement number 1/2024, the sole position for the recruitment of professors has been reserved in certain departments, namely Commerce, Hindi, and Philosophy. However, reserving a single position in the said recruitment contradicts the ruling of the Supreme Court of India.
As outlined in the Supreme Court’s ruling dated September 23, 2015, civil appeal number 1931 of 2010, Akhilesh Kumar Singh vs. Ram Dawan and Ors., it is explicitly stated that reserving a solitary post within a cadre excludes the broader public and the issue of reservation becomes relevant only in the presence of multiple vacancies within the cadre.
In the said ruling, it is mentioned that reservation in a single post cadre, due to roster rotation, inevitably results in the exclusive reservation of that post for backward class members, thereby completely excluding the general public. It highlights that “such total exclusion of general members of the public and cent percent reservation for the backward classes is not permissible within the constitutional framework.”
It further states that the question of reservation only arises when there are multiple posts within a cadre, as any attempt at reservation, even through roster rotation in a single post cadre, ultimately leads to 100 percent reservation of that post whenever reservation is applied. However, the ruling says “In fact on all occasions, a single post cadre should have been filled only by open competition amongst all segments of the society.”
The same violations have also been made in the past too. In a recruitment notification dated January 20, 2020, advertisement number 1/2022, the vacancies of professors in Commerce and Philosophy were only announced for the reserved categories. Similarly in an earlier notification dated August 9, 2019, bearing advertisement number 4/19, the Assistant Professors vacancies in the department of Teachers Education, Linguistics, Chemistry, History, Geography, and Library and Information Sciences were all in reserved categories.