Govt brings back old varsity faculty reservation system

New Delhi: After facing strong criticism from opposition parties over 13-point roster system for reservation in university teacher's job, the government on Thursday cleared an ordinance to supersede the Supreme Court order in this regard. The Ordinance has been brought to restore the earlier 200-point roster system in varsities for the teacher's job.

While addressing the media to brief about the decisions taken at the last Cabinet meeting of the government Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said that the university would now be taken as one unit for reservation of teacher jobs under the Ordinance.

Jaitley further said, "The reservation roster at universities was earlier governed by circulars of the University Grants Commission, but the Allahabad High Court delivered a judgement in 2017 that invalidated the instructions and mandated that departments, and not the entire institute, should be treated as the unit for determining reserved positions."

"The Ordinance cleared by the Cabinet has maintained that university would be treated as one unit for reservation of teacher job," he further added.

The University Grants Commission (UGC) had announced last March that an individual department should be considered as the base unit to calculate the number of teaching posts to be reserved for the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) candidates, following an order by the Allahabad High Court in April 2017.

Earlier this week, Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar had said that the Centre was committed to restoring the reservation roster in educational institutions following a series of protests over the issue by various students' and teachers' organisations. They had been urging the government to bring an ordinance to restore the 200-point roster taking college or university as a unit for reservation in teaching posts. The Supreme Court had last month dismissed a review petition filed by the HRD Ministry after its special leave petition against the court order was rejected by the apex court.

Hailing the decision of the Centre, Bihar BJP president Nityanand Rai said, "The decision to bring an Ordinance to restore the 200-point roster system makes it clear that Prime Minister Narendra Prime Modi is committed protecting the rights of SCs/STs and OBCs."

"Our stand was very clear from begging as during the Budget session of the Parliament, the HRD Minister had made it clear that in case of rejection of review petition, the government would bring an Ordinance. Since the Opposition parties have no understanding of statements made in the Parliament; they took to the streets to create confusion among people over the issue. Now everything is clear and their political agenda has also been exposed," said Rai, who represents Ujiarpur parliamentary constituency.

Hailing the decision, Lok Janshakti Party (LJP) chief Ram Vilas Paswan said that the move restores the rights of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. "I thank Prime Minister Narendra Modi for this decision. The rights of SC and ST are restored. This reflects the commitment of the government towards SC/ST," Paswan told reporters.

"For a professor post, SCs were getting a lesser quota of 4 as per the 13-point roster instead of 133 as per the earlier 200-point roaster.

Similarly, the quota for STs and OBCs for faculty post were reduced," Paswan said.