Madurai: The Madurai Bench of the Madras High court yesterday quashed the order of Tamil Nadu government reducing pass percentage mark in the Teachers Eligibity Test from 60 per cent to 55 per cent for SC/ST, BC, BC(M), MBC and OBC candidates, saying government was adopting “double standard.”
Allowing a petition filed by one K K Ramakrishnan, a bench, comprising Justices V Ramasubramanian and V M Velumani set aside the government order.
However, the bench made it clear that if any selection had already been made on the basis of the the order, persons who were selected and appointed and those selected for appointment on the basis of the order shall not be terminated.
Challenging the government order issued in February this year, the petitioner contended that it strikes at the root of objective of the parent legislation to provide quality education to the students by qualified teachers.
Referring to the state government's claim that there were many representations from the ‘stakeholders' and hence the government order was passed, Justice V Ramasubramanian said “the expression ‘stakeholders' is a very vague term and we do not know how a policy decision has been taken on the basis of the representation from such ‘stakeholders', whose identity is not known.”
The judges said the policy of the very same government just one year before the issuance of the order was actually to the contrary.
They pointed out that on February 5, the same government had filed a counter affidavit in a case related to the TET stating that it had taken a policy decision not to compromise the quality of teachers and took a decision in the interest of students not to grant relaxation to any categories.
It is quite unfortunate that after getting a seal of approval from the very same High Court on February 5 to their policy not to dilute standards, the state government did a volte-face on the very next day, by issuing the impugned government order.
“If we now put a seal of approval to the present policy also, we would just be converting ourselves into mere rubber stamps when even the ink on the signatures of the judges of the division bench who passed the previous orders had not dried,” the judges said.
The judges said the contention that the socially backward sections of society have to be treated differently loses sight
of one important fact that TET is not a competitive examination but a qualifying examination.
Unfortunately, the distinction between the qualifying examination and competitive examination has been lost sight of. “This is due to the fact that due to the extremely low percentage of candidates who passed in the TET, a qualifying exam has been enlarged to appear as a competitive exam.”
Pointing out that for every teacher there are 40 students in a class, the bench said “therefore the contention based upon social justice does not actually take note of those at the receiving end.”
The Judges said “if the reduction in the pass mark benefits hundreds of individuals belonging to the socially backward segment of society, by the very same logic, it will deprive lakhs of children belonging to the very same segment of the society to have quality teachers imparting training to them.”
