Agartala: The High Court of Tripura full bench led by Chief Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh in its first ever live hearing on Tuesday dismissed a petition of one of the retrenched 10,323 teachers who questioned the process of termination.
The petitioner argued that he was not a party in the petition in which the High Court scrapped the recruitment rules based on which the appointments were made.
Speaking on the issue, Advocate General SS Dey said, “One of the 10,323 teachers moved the High Court questioning the process of termination. In his plea, the petitioner tried to say that he had been terminated from services despite not being a party in the case in which the recruitments rules had been challenged. From our point, the government said that none of them had been terminated from the services. In fact, the state government moved the Supreme Court seeking relief for them much after the apex court had already upheld the judgment of the High Court”.
The fact remains, he explained, that the state government extended their period of service till March 2020 on ad-hoc basis. “The termination which is in question is not done by the department under the state government. Their jobs cease to exist because of a judicial order. The state government issued memorandum in accordance with the judgment and informed the teachers that the Court has given a deadline that after March 2020, the government would not be able to keep all of you in service. Hence all of you are terminated”, Dey told EastMojo.
He added that since the government is not directly terminating the teachers from services, no question of serving notices arise.
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According to the advocate general, the High Court has categorically used the term “despicable” for the repeated attempts made by the 10,323 teachers to file fresh petitions in connection with same matter. “The Court has said that the petitioner had nothing new to say before the Court. The petitioner also fails to explain as to why he should still be in service in spite of the fact that the whole recruitment policy of the previous government was described as unconstitutional in the successive judgments of the High Court and the Supreme Court”, Dey said.
The Court imposed a cost of Rs 25,000 on the petitioner for wastage of judicial time, Dey informed.
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