Maharashtra: No permission from Bombay HC to 10 ammunition factory staff to appear for competitive exam o – Times of India

MUMBAI: In a rare Sunday hearing Bombay high court declined permission to 10 skilled staff from ammunition factory in Pune to appear for a departmental competitive examination on October 5. A bench of chief justice Dipankar Datta and Justice Girish Kulkarni at a hearing via video-conferencing from the CJ bungalow expressed their sympathies to the employees who wanted to take the exam for a departmental promotion, but said they had to abide by law and precedents.
The reason for no relief was that the ten employees had while seeking an order on compassionate grounds over delay in submitting application for the examination within a June 15 deadline due to the pandemic, had not challenged the recruitment notice.
“You have not challenged the notice and have accepted it in its entirety,’’ said the CJ to advocated Vicky Nagrani and Amjith Anandhan who had made an urgent plea for a Sunday hearing to challenge an October 1 order of the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) against the employees.
Mahesh Balke and nine others had enrolled for a diploma in engineering while working and but for the Covid-19 pandemic would have completed it this May, had the exam not been postponed. On May 27, the Centre called for applications to the superior post. The ten were found eligible provisionally but later rejected since they had failed to produce the diploma certificate.
“We fully sympathize with your client but the Supreme Court judgment (on the law) stares us in our face,’’ said the bench.
The bench did not interfere with what it said was a “well-reasoned order passed by CAT’’ dismissing their plea, adding also that there may others also who are affected and any order passed would be inequitable to the others not before the court.
A second petition by two candidates from another ordinance factory for permission to appear for the same examination was withdrawn.
Additional Solicitor general Anil Singh for the Centre and Rui Rodrigues also appeared at the virtual hearing. Singh said “after a long time the court sat on a Sunday.’’ The CJ said, “we are there 24 by 7 for any matter’’ and Justice Kulkarni recalled how when he was a lawyer in 2013 a bench of Justices Shiavax Vazifdar and K R Sriram sat for a day long hearing in court one Sunday which Rodrigues said he too had appeared in, it being another exam matter, but by students of a city college.