SHC makes hiring of teachers conditional to scrutiny

Orders formation of committee to look into alleged anomalies in recruitment process

HYDRABAD:

The Sindh High Court (SHC) Hyderabad circuit bench has put the recruitment of the BPS-14 primary school teachers and BPS-14 primary junior elementary school teachers to scrutiny.

The bench on Tuesday ordered the Sindh Education and Literacy Department to form a committee of experts to examine the alleged controversies in the recruitment process.

The order has been given in a petition filed by 111 candidates who had taken the test. Their counsel advocate Sajjad Ahmed Chandio apprised the court that the Sindh government advertised the posts in February, 2020. The Sukkur IBA University (SIBAU) was tasked to conduct the recruitment test.

The petitioners like thousands of other candidates applied for the jobs. On December 17, 2020, the education department circulated through an advertisement in the newspaper the syllabus for the test. The lawyer told the court that it was widely discussed that SIBUA allegedly placed some wrong questions and multiple choice questions in the test paper.

The lawyer said the purpose of prescribing curriculum suggests that all the questions would remain limited to that course. The petitioners blamed the university's testing service for deliberately designing the test paper with flawed questions in order to accommodate the candidates with political backing in the appointments.

The government declared some districts as 'hard areas' through a notification dated March 19, 2021, and reduced the pass percentage of 55 per cent for those districts to 33 per cent. "This is sheer violation of merit, rules, recruitment policy 2021, the given laws and fundamental rights of the citizens," they contended.

Similarly, the percentage requirement for the female candidates and for those from the minority was also lowered from 55 to 50 per cent. The petitioners alleged that political motive rather merit was behind those decisions.

They informed the court that some of the petitioners secured more than 50 per cent marks but they were still declared failure. A provision of the recruitment policy 2021 allows decreasing the pass percentage for the hard area to the lowest of 40 per cent.

They prayed the court to declare unlawful the act of lowering the percentage requirement on the basis of area, religion and gender. They also pleaded the court to direct the respondents to give all the candidates grace marks to compensate for the flawed queries in the test paper.

They urged the court to ask the government to form a committee of experts to review the question paper. The SHC was also requested to declare that the relaxation for the hard area as notified on March 19, 2021, a violation of the recruitment policy.

The court ordered the education department to constitute a committee of experts to examine alleged mistakes in the question paper. The committee has also been told to scrutinise the issue of the hard areas. The experts have been given a month by the court to complete the task.

The court has empowered the committee to compensate the candidates with grace marks against the erroneous questions, if any. The recommendations will not only apply to the petitioners but all the candidates who took test for the said posts.

The secretary education has been ordered to either rectify the issued notification or issue a new one in the light of the committee's recommendations. However, the recommendations will have no effect on the candidates who have been declared qualified.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 27^th, 2022.