Chennai: Madras high court has directed education authorities to produce appointment orders before the court on April 19, appointing six persons as PG teachers in compliance with earlier orders of the court.
Justice N. Kirubakaran gave the directive while passing further interim orders on a batch of petitions from S. Venkatachallam and others. When the case came up for hearing on Friday all five government officials including the higher education secretary appeared before the court. Originally, the judge had on November 30, 2017, directed the authorities to appoint the petitioners as they were having valid degrees.
However, they were not given appointment orders. Hence, the matter was mentioned before the court and was called for hearing many times. In his present order, the judge said the Higher Education secretary, Sunil Paliwal has sworn an affidavit stating that the government has taken a decision to issue amendment to a G.O dated January 5, 2016 to the effect that in so far s orders issued treating B.Ed of Vinayaka Missions University as not equivalent to B.Ed of Tamil Nadu Teachers Education University be cancelled and further to request the TNPSC to cancel the resolution already passed in respect of non-equivalence of the degree courses.
By filing such affidavit, Additional advocate general Narmada Sampath submitted that action was being taken by the government to amend the G.O and she sought time to process the same and issue appointment orders to the selected candidates, the judge added.
The judge said senior advocate Nalini Chidambaram and advocate R.N. Amarnath opposed such request stating that the order has been passed in November 2017 and the government was buying time for some other extraneous considerations.
The judge said, “this court has held that the G.O is not applicable to the present petitioners and therefore the said G.O will not be a hindrance for the authorities to make appointment of the petitioners. Therefore, appropriate orders have to be passed for appointing the petitioners and the orders of appointment have to be produced before this court on April 19”.
