In a major setback to the Akhilesh Yadav government, the Allahabad high court has restrained the state government from providing reservation facility to “adequately represented” classes in recruitment of close to 40,000 constables in the civil police, the Provincial Armed Constabulary and the fire services.
In a major setback to the Akhilesh Yadav government, the Allahabad high court has restrained the state government from providing reservation facility to “adequately represented” classes in recruitment of close to 40,000 constables in the civil police, the Provincial Armed Constabulary and the fire services. The court order will directly affect Yadavs, kurmis and jats who are “adequately represented” in the services. The order was passed by Justice Sudhir Agarwal on a petition filed by one Sumit Kumar Shukla and three others who had applied for the posts of constables following an advertisement published by the Uttar Pradesh Police Recruitment and Promotion Board on June 20, 2013. Admitting the petition, the court noted that the Supreme Court has made it clear that reservation can continue only if a particular class was not “adequately represented” in service. “The state government deserves to be restrained from continuing with reservation in respect of such classes which are now adequately represented in service in the recruitment in question,” the court said. Through this advertisement, 35,500 vacancies were advertised for the civil police, 4,033 for PAC and 2,077 for firemen. Among the posts advertised, 17,750 posts in the civil police were reserved for SCs, STs and OBCs, while the number of reserved posts in PAC and fire department stood at 2,017 and 1,039, respectively. The petitioners had objected to the huge number of vacancies reserved for OBC, SC and ST on the grounds that representation of these categories is extremely high in the state services, including that of police, therefore, continuation of reservation for them is “unconstitutional”. “The state government, without looking into the level of representation of various classes constituting OBC, SC and ST, is continuing with reservation in a mechanical manner irrespective of the fact whether their representation has gone much beyond the required level, that is, adequate representation,” the petitioners had said.
