HC Puts Recruitment Of Odisha Junior Teachers On Hold Till Jan 30

Cuttack: The Orissa High Court on Wednesday asked the state government to put the recruitment of junior teachers on hold till January 30.

However, the court allowed the authorities concerned to continue the process involving the verification of documents.

The next date of hearing of a petition earlier filed alleging irregularities was fixed for January 30.
The state government informed the court that they have published a district-wise selection list of the candidates. Hearing the case, the Court asked the government to submit an affidavit on whether the state-wide general list of selected candidates has been scrapped or not.

Speaking about the hearing, the counsel of the petitioner, Sameer Kumar Das said, “We wanted the government to stop selection from the state list and issue another district-wise list of the candidates. The government said that it has prepared a district list. But when the court asked whether the State list has been withdrawn or not, the government denied it saying the State list still prevails.”

“We put forth an example from Balasore district where the government website has some selected candidates who have not chosen Balasore as their preference. They are selected on the basis of higher marks. But that should not have been the case. The government should have selected candidates on the basis of their district preference,” Das added.

The next hearing in the case has been listed for January 30. The court’s interim order for the government to hold the selection process will continue till then.

It may be noted here that OSEPA had published the draft merit list of 18,805 candidates and fixed January 20 and 21 for verification of documents. Following this, a large number of aspirants had last week alleged that the merit list published by OSEPA was done without announcing the cut-off mark. They also alleged that there were several anomalies in the issue of admit cards some of which had fake names and photos on them.