The division bench of Calcutta High Court that had last week ordered an interim stay on Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay’s order sacking over 32,000 teachers in government-aided primary schools has said in its order: “It is trite that Justice Delayed is Justice Denied and conversely, Justice Hurried is Justice Buried”.
“…the single bench had a duty to extend a right of hearing, even in representative capacity, to the present appointees, i.e. the appellants,” the order says.
The interim stay will be in force till September or “until further orders, whichever is earlier”.
The order of the division bench of Justice Subrata Talukdar and Justice Supratim Bhattacharya reads: “This court intends to record that niceties of law relating to grant of natural justice, accrual of rights, delay and waiver, burden of proof, precedential value of judicial decisions have a role to play in maintaining the system of adversarial litigation adopted by our courts, unless hopelessly excluded. It is trite that Justice Delayed is Justice Denied and conversely, Justice Hurried is Justice Buried....
“To the mind of this court therefore, the termination of jobs, otherwise protected by two earlier orders of concurrent single benches, without extending a meaningful right of defence to the affected parties, prima facie requires judicial intervention.”
The bench said the “alleged complicity” of the candidates who got jobs as teachers in primary schools in the commission of the alleged fraud “required deeper scrutiny, leaving the issue thereafter to the court to strike down all fraudulent action”.
“Accordingly, there shall be an interim stay on termination of jobs till the end of September 2023 or, until further orders, whichever is earlier.”
The interim order of the division bench was issued on Friday. The written order was uploaded on the website of the court on Saturday.
Justice Gangopadhyay had scrapped the appointment of 32,000 teachers of primary schools on the grounds that they did not have a diploma in elementary education at the time of recruitment and did not appear in an aptitude test.
The state primary education board had on November 28, 2022, published a booklet disclosing the marks of the 1,24,000 candidates who had qualified the teachers’ eligibility test held in 2015, said a senior board official. Among them were the 32,000-odd candidates who stood to lose their jobs following Justice Gangopadhyay’sorder.
The division bench’s order reads: “That admittedly the writ petitioners (who challenged the appointments)accrued a cause-of-action with the discovery of fresh materials placed by the board on the 28th of November,2022. As a consequence thereof, the single bench was within its jurisdiction to inquire into the aspects connected to the discovery of fresh materials (supra). At the same time, the single bench had a duty to extend a right of hearing, even in representative capacity, to the present appointees, i.e. the appellants (who challenged the termination).”
“This duty became manifest in the context of the appellants being protected from the loss of their jobs being the consequence of the decisions rendered by two earlier concurrent single benches of this court,” the order reads.
Goutam Paul, president of the state primary board, told The Telegraph on Monday: “Since the court is on vacation, we will take a call on what would be our next course of action at an appropriate time.” The division bench upheld that part of Justice Gangopadhyay’s order in which he said a fresh panel of candidates had to be drawn up within three months to fill the posts that would fall vacant once the 32,000-odd teachers lose their jobs. The division bench’s order says: “The board shall conduct the selection exercise exactly as directed by the single bench within a period of three months.”
Email to VCs
The office of Governor C.V. Ananda Bose, who is also chancellor of all state universities, has told vice-chancellors that although they were told in April to email a “weekly activity report” to Raj Bhavan on the last working day of every week, “no such report is seen to have reached so far”.
“You may do the needful,” says an emailed communication signed by a senior special secretary, governor’s secretariat.