Jharkhand governor withholds assent to SC/ST seniority bill
Jharkhand governor Ramesh Bais on Wednesday sent to the Attorney General of India a bill passed by the state legislature in March to facilitate promotion of state government employees belonging to Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste on the basis of seniority.
Jharkhand governor Ramesh Bais on Wednesday sent to the Attorney General of India a bill passed by the state legislature in March to facilitate promotion of state government employees belonging to Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste on the basis of seniority.
The “Jharkhand Extension Of Consequential Seniority to Government Servants Promoted On The Basis of Reservations To The Posts In The State Services Bill, 2022” was passed by the state assembly during the budget session on March 24.
The assembly gave its nod to the bill even as the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and All Jharkhand Students Union or AJSU party demanded that it first be sent to a select committee for a detailed discussion.
According to the Bill, “coonsequential seniority” refers to ‘the seniority of a government employee that shall be determined from the date of promotion’. If cleared, it would affect the promotion of around 50,000 SC/ST employees in the state government, officials familiar with the matter said.
The Bill was drafted on the basis of a report by a committee formed by the state government to quantify and assess the representation of SC/ST employees for the purpose of providing reservation in promotion. The Bill was cleared by the state’s advocate general.
After its passage in March, the Bill was sent to the governor for consent in the last week of April, officials familiar with the matter said. The governor, however, has raised questions over the method used by the committee in quantifying the data and has decided to seek legal opinion from Attorney General of India, K K Venugopal, they added.
“The quantifiable data collected by the committee on the basis of which the Bill has been passed does not appear to be in conformity with a Supreme Court judgment on a related issue. So the governor has decided to send the Bill to the Attorney General of India for legal opinion,” a senior Raj Bhawan official said, seeking anonymity.
This is the fifth Bill of the state government to which the governor has decided to withhold his consent in recent months. Four Bills cleared by the state assembly, including one against mob lynching, were returned to the state over purported differences in English and Hindi versions of the Bill. The government was directed to make the amendments and get it cleared by the assembly again.
Jharkhand Congress president Rajesh Thakur termed the governor’s continuous refusal to give his assent to the Bills as “unfortunate”.
“These developments are unfortunate. Our governor has served in the Lok Sabha for a very long time and has also served as a minister. So he must be aware of the nitty gritties. Instead of pointing at small language mistakes in various sub-clauses of the Bill, he should see the larger picture. For example, in the agricultural produce taxation Bill, it would be more constructive to see if the Bill would be beneficial to farmers than returning it just because there is some language difference,” he said.
“This government does not mean business. Or else they would not send bills after bills without even checking what they are translating to. They do not have experts to tell them that it could have legal consequences. They are sending bills to the Governor just for the sake of it,” Jharkhand BJP spokesperson Pratul Shahdeo said.