The selection of teachers to one of the premier Central Universities of the country — the Banaras Hindu University — has come under a cloud after the Supreme Court last week noticed how the university threw rules to the wind for selecting Assistant Professors for the Commerce Department of the University.
One of the contenders for the post of Assistant Professor, who lost out in the race, approached the apex court with a plea to set aside the selection of five Assistant Professors to the Commerce department made by a high-powered Selection Committee of BHU on February 5, 2014.
The bench of Justices J Chelameswar and Abhay Manohar Sapre, while dealing with the petition has ordered “status quo” as regards the selection made. It issued notice to the university and the five successful candidates to respond to the charges leveled by Brajesh Kumar Tiwari, the petitioner in the instant case.
Tiwari submitted that both the Regulations of the University Grants Commission (UGC) and the Ordinance of the University clearly suggest that incomplete applications for any vacancy will stand automatically rejected.
The UGC Regulations also provide that prior to selection there must be an assessment of merit of the interested candidate. For this reason, the Selection Committee prescribed 50 per cent marks to Academic and Research Performance, followed by 30 per cent marks to domain knowledge and teaching skills and finally 20 per cent marks on performance in the interview.
The petitioner was placed as first in the wait list candidates who was to succeed if any of the five selected candidates fail to join. He demonstrated the “malafide” in the appointment process by singling out one of the selected persons, Vandana Srivastava, whose application form, according to the petitioner was incomplete. The mandatory columns such as nationality, address, parentage, statement about work done, statement about proposed research were missing in the form. Interestingly, the University rejected incomplete form of other candidates while overlooked this lapse in the case of Srivastava, leading to an impression in the mind of the petitioner that a “pick and choose” method for selection was adopted by the Committee. Even the minutes of the Selection Committee do not provide information on the marks awarded to candidates under various heads - academic performance, domain knowledge, and interview.
The petitioner further doubted on the domain knowledge of Srivastava as her subject was Management which is not linked with Commerce, the department to which selection is to be made.
Tiwari’s counsel, senior advocate Rekha Palli told the Court, “The entire selection process by the University reeks of malafide and arbitrariness and some of the candidates selected are not even eligible as per prescribed UGC Guidelines and Regulations and therefore the entire process should be set aside.”