AGARTALA, November 21 (TIWN): The final hearing in the reservation in promotion at Tripura High Court ended today. However, Chief Justice Deepak Gupta said that, if the defence and appellant parties can get more witnesses, they can submit it before the final judgment.In the 1st session on third and final day of the hearing , appellant lawyer Kiran Suri presented the clarification in support of the case filed by the different officers against the Government. The documents submitted by Mrs Suri totally potrayed the picture that how general category people are being deprived everytime because of the reservation in promotion of the backward classes.It is to be mentioned here that the case was filed due to success and inspiration from the similiar previous case filed by M.Nagaraju v/s States of Karnataka. In order to inspire the appellants, Mr. Nagaraju himself remained present in the Court for three days continuously and now he is confident that the verdict of the case would be in favour of the general category.

However, the Chief Justice asked  Law Secretary and Deputy Law Secretary to issue a clarification behind the negligence to avoid Court order that was scheduled for this Friday. It is to be mentioned here that,  on June 20th of 2012, the then division bench of Guwahati High Court led by  Justice Ansari and S.C.Das, had put a stay order in the Rule 9(2) against the reservation in promotion vide case No. NP(C) 124 of 2012. But the order had carried a printing mistake. The word “ Act “ had been put instead of “Rule.” When the order was received by SC/ST    Department, it had sent it to the Law Department for clarification. Law Secretary ignored the order of the Hon' ble Court, nor the Department had sent it to the Court for further clarification. Accordingly, the State Government has been following its own policy for the  promotion under reservation category. In the second session on Thursday evening in  the hearing of the reservation in promotion, Appellant lawyer B.B.Das had sorted out that there was a printing mistake in the previous order issued by the then Guwahati High Court, Agartala Division Bench in relation to the recent case. Immediately it had caught the attention of Chief Justice, Deepak Gupta. Mr Gupta, read out the order and suddenly became angry . Accordingly, Chief Justice said that even a spelling mistake can directly relate to the of contempt of court. After this Mr.Gupta had ordered the Law Secretary and Additional Law Secretary to remain present before the Court on Friday.

Tripura Govt's 2011 statistics of reservation in promotions . TIWN Pic

      Earlier, Tripura Government  violated the rule of  promotion  process of employees and officers, more than 80% of the promotional posts were alloted to SC/ST reserve category candidatesand a mere 20% were alloted to general category. It is also seen that 50 to 80 percent employees belonging to ScheduledCaste and Scheduled Tribes are occupying the top most positions in the administration. In spite of their reservation method, by faulty merit list, they sometimes occupy the position in the general category also.

In order to protest against this, the general category officers and employees organization, namely General Officers and Employees Welfare Society had filed a case in the Guwahati High Court. Inspite of that some TPS, TCS, TGS and IAS Officers had also filed case separately. The then division bench of Guwahati High Court had put a stay order in the promotion process in the year 2012. But, the State Government had turned a deaf ear to this and continues its earlier practice. In the meantime the Supreme Court had cancelled the reservation method on 13-09-2013. It is to be mentioned here that, the reservation method was already cancelled in many states except Tripura and Himachal Pradesh. But the Himachal Pradesh Government had also cancelled this method in the year 2013. That means reservation policy still now exists only in Tripura.

Himachal Govt's order cancelling promotions of SC/ST candidates citing Supreme Court guidelines . TIWN Pic

    In view of this, the High Court of Tripura had allotted time for hearing by collaborating all the issues of promotion. A Division Bench of the High Court comprising Chief Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice SC Das on September 9th amalgamated all four petitions and formulated eight fundamental points to dwell on relating all of them. The High Court announced the tentative date of hearing from 19th- 21st November. After the Court heard all petitions for two days, the petition filed by Manab Roy was eliminated from the criteria on the ground that it dwelt more on service rules rather than reservation policy.