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Cabinet clears ordinance to roll back university faculty quota move
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said the university would be taken as one unit for reservation of teacher jobs under the new ordinance.
The Cabinet on Thursday cleared an ordinance to restore the 200-point roster for reservation in faculty recruitment in universities and colleges. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who was briefing reporters on a string of decisions taken at the last cabinet meeting before national elections, said the university would be taken as one unit for reservation of teacher jobs under the ordinance.
Arun Jaitley said the reservation roster at universities was earlier governed by circulars of the University Grants Commission. But the Allahabad High Court delivered a judgment 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 Supreme Court upheld the high court verdict, leading to a change in the roster system that had provoked a pushback from leaders representing scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities. It was argued that the new system drastically reduces the number of reserved seats.
The ordinance reverse this stand and classifies an entire university or college as a single unit for determining Scheduled Caste (SC), Scheduled Tribe (ST) and Other Backward Class (OBC) quota.
This is the second time the government has rolled back a court order in the face of protests by the SC-ST communities. Nationwide demonstrations against the perceived dilution of the SC/ST Act by the Supreme Court, which barred provisions such as automatic arrest and no anticipatory bail, had spurred the government to introduce a bill last August to effectively reverse the judgment.
Several students and teaching associations had criticized the new system alleging it will have disastrous implications of decimating SC/ST/OBC reservation in university faculty positions. The opposition had pulled up the Modi government for failing to file SLP in SC or brining an ordinance.
On Tuesday, people opposed to the SC ruling had called Bharat bandh. Several opposition parties had joined the bandh. Earlier, universities adopted a system under which every fourth teachers was appointed from OBC category, seventh from SC category and 14th from ST category
