The Delhi High Court has deterred the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) from commencing any fresh recruitment process for the post of over 200 professors and associate professors until it publishes newly prepared roster points for the vacancies.
The bench of Justice Rajiv Sahai Endow and Justice Sanjeev Narula also mandated JNU to revisit and reexamine and recast the point-based roster for all posts and in the light of the judgment of the Single Judge and following the post-based reservation system.
The Delhi High Court also illustrated that the appointments already made will not be adversely affected.
The Single Judge Bench had on November 17 last year quashed JNU’s August 2019 advertisements concerning two posts — associate professor and a professor in the School of Social Sciences (SSS) and the School of International Studies (SIS).
Reservation rosters
The court had then asserted that The reservation rosters have to be post-based and there cannot be an exchange of reservation points or de-reservation. The latter is permissible only in very exceptional cases and that too by following a very rigorous process.
Post-based reservation mandates that specific teaching posts be reserved for persons belonging to reserved categories such as SC, ST, OBC.
Advocate Maanav Kumar, who represented the petitioners — 2 professors and 2 assistant professors — said that though the Single Judge Bench of the court found “illegalities/errors” in the post-based roster followed by JNU in issuing the 2019 recruitment advertisements, the order was restricted concerning only two posts and not all 267 posts that were advertised.
Disappearance of posts
The plea contended that the “illegalities/errors” found in the two posts can be equally applied to other posts also. It stated that though the total number of vacant posts and those reserved for SC/STs had not undergone any significant change in recent years, in the 2019 advertisement, the number of “unfilled” SC/ST posts at JNU dropped from 91 in 2017 to 57 in 2019. The petition claimed that this removal/disappearance of over 30 such posts was illegal.
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The petition claimed that JNU has failed to maintain and carry forward SC/ST reserved “backlog” posts in the 2019 advertisements.
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