The advertisement published last week for faculty posts by The Central University of Tamil Nadu and the Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, Amarkantak, under a controversial new policy on the implementation of reservation, has provoked widespread protests.
Not one position out of the total of 117 posts of professor, associate professor and assistant professor advertised by these two institutions, is reserved for the Scheduled Castes or Scheduled Tribes. SCs and STs are appropriately entitled to 15 and 7.5 per cent reservation, respectively and have entirely been deprived of it.
Other Backward Classes have received only 3 reserved seats, when they are actually entitled to 27 per cent of all posts.
The Central University of Tamil Nadu advertised 65 posts in total with only two seats reserved for the OBCs and none for SCs and STs. The Indira Gandhi National Tribal University, on the other hand, advertised 52 posts, including only one for the OBCs and none for SCs and STs.
In April 2017, the High Court ruled that each department should be considered a unit, whereas earlier, an educational institution as a whole was taken as a unit while implementing teaching job reservations.
Kesav Kumar, an Ambedarkite scholar who teaches philosophy in Delhi University, stated that the old policy would have required these institutions to reserve 30 posts for the OBCs, 18 for Dalits and 9 for tribal candidates. That would make a total of 57 reserved posts out of the published 117, instead of the given 3.
The promised apex court petition against the Allahabad High Court judgment that led to this new policy should have been moved by the government but it was not done so.
Kesav added that, “These universities want to recruit as many candidates from the general category as they can; that’s why they have implemented the new policy so fast.It’s an anti-constitutional act.”
