Orissa HC Rejects Plea For Return Of Registration Fee For Job Fair From Govt

Cuttack: The Orissa High Court has rejected a petition filed for return of registration fee collected by the state government from the applicants for a job fair as it was not conducted.

As per the case, the Biju Patnaik University of Technology (BPUT) and State Employment and Technical Education and Training (ETET) department had announced to jointly organise a special recruitment drive in 2014. They had issued advertisement seeking application from interested candidates with registration fee of Rs 100.

The job fair was scheduled to be held for engineering, MBA, MCA and pharma graduate and post-graduate candidates in Bhubaneswar from September 17 to 20 in 2014. But the event was not organised.

One Thakur Ranjit Das had filed the petition in the High Court through his counsel Partha Sarathi Nayak in June, 2015 seeking the court’s direction to the government to return the fee. After hearing the petition, the High Court issued a notice to the state government on June 10, 2015. But the government did not filed its response.

When the case came up for hearing on Tuesday, a division bench comprising Chief Justice S Muralidhar and Justice Chittaranjan Dash rejected the petition. “The present petition has been pending since 2015. The Court is not persuaded to hold that collecting Rs 100 for each of the applications towards the recruitment drive is an unreasonable exercise considering that a lot of arrangements have to be put in place for such a special recruitment drive,” TNIE quoted the bench as saying.

“It would not be practical for the government to be ordered at this stage more than seven years after the said recruitment drive to locate each of the applicants to refund the application fee collected,” the bench observed.