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Journalism of Courage
The state government today informed the Bombay High Court that the reservation policy followed in promoting government officials has indeed led to more officers being promoted, but these were “due to the policy prevalent at the relevant time and the procedure followed was prior to the judgement of the Supreme Court in the R K Sabharwal case”. The state affidavit has therefore prayed that the contempt petition filed by a retired Mumbai Port Trust employee Anil Joshi against the state government including the state home minister Gopinath Munde, had no merit and should be dismissed. Joshi’s petition alleged that the state has deliberately violated assurances given to the high court on implementing the reservation policy in Maharashtra, according to the directions of the Supreme Court. This is the third contempt petition being filed by Joshi on the issue.
The matter had come up for hearing before the bench of Justice A P Shah. However ,with the state filing an affidavit today, the petitioner sought a week’stime to reply. The affidavit filed by Anjali Sakhalkar, joint secretary in the home department, claimed that there was a mistake in an affidavit filed in 1997 and that the total number of officers in the scheduled caste (SC) category who were promoted in excess were only 13, as against 33 mentioned earlier. The state official has apologised to the court for the mistake. The affidavit claimed that of the 219 seats reserved for SC category for police inspectors, an excess of 13 officers had been promoted. In the ST category the excess was 37 and 25 in the denotified nomadic tribes. The assistant police inspector promotions in the reserved category as of June 30, 1999 was that there were an excess of 25 officers in the SC category and 34 in the ST category.
Rule on meat exports stayed
The Bombay High Court today stayed an amendment made by the Union government in the Raw Meat (Chilled/Frozen) Quality Control & Inspection rule which sought to stop exporters of meat from sourcing their productsfrom localabattoirs. Acceding to a prayer from petitioners, Miki Exports International, Al-Noor Exporters, M K Overseas Pvt Ltd and Al-Nafiz Frozen Food Exporters Ltd, the division bench of Justice M B Ghodeswar and Justice B N Srikrishna in an ad-interim relief stayed the rule. The petitioners had argued against the rule, amended on July 9 by the Union government which explicitly stated that the meat from local abattoirs could not be eligible for exports. All these petitioners sourced their meat from the Deonar abattoir run by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation. The rule amended by the Centre read: Meat sourced from animals slaughtered in an abattoir or a slaughter house run by a local authority cannot be eligible for export. This was an amendment on the earlier rule whereby exporters of meat could source their products from abattoirs which had met the quality standards set out in IS4393. According to the petitioners, the All India Meat and Livestock Exporters’ Association had till now striven hard andhad helped upgrade the standards of the local abattoirs to the standards as laid down by the rule.
Centralised admissions
The division bench of Justice A V Sawant and Justice R J Kochar today ruled that even minority colleges, which could fill their 50 per cent seat quota from their own community, would have to abide by the centralised admission process. The bench were ruling on a petition filed by the Maharashtra Cosmopolitan Education Society, Pune where the petitioners had claimed a minority institute status and had challenged the state government rules that the institute would have to take students for the quota given to the management through the university laid down centralised admission tests. The institute had been given the sanction by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) to conduct Masters in Management Studies (MMS) courses from 1998. The institute has 60 seats for the MMS courses, of which 30 have been filled through the centralised admission tests conducted by the PuneUniversity. The other 50 per cent, ie 30 seats, the institute wanted to fill through examinations conducted by them for aspirants from their community. However, advocate for Pune University, Anil Anturkar successfully argued that the institute, was not a minority one at all, as the constitution of the institute did not make any such mention. Just because it was run by educationists professing the Muslim faith does not make it a Muslim minority institute, he argued.
Secondly, he argued that since the institute had been given a recognition by the AICTE, it was understood that it would abide by all the rules laid down by the monitoring body. This included that the management quota would be filled by the common test conducted by the university as well.The bench found merit in the arguments and directed the institute to source its students for the management quota from the centralised tests alone.
PPPIL: Plea for intervention
Digvijay Khanwilkar (MLA), who had filed a public interest litigationagainst the Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB)’s Rs 189 crore contract to Powerplant Performance Ltd (PPPIL), today made a civil application to the high court pointing out that the advance paid to PPPIL had not been returned as yet. The HC has already directed a CBI enquiry into the contract where PPPIL was awarded a contract for retrofitting turbines. The contract was scrapped in January this year. The division bench of the Chief Justice Y K Sabharwal and Justice S H Kapadia posted the matter for hearing on Thursday. Counsel for the petitioner informed that the MSEB had paid Rs 5.7 crore as advance for the contract to PPPIL in 1998 and since the contract was scrapped, the money, with due interest had to be given back to the MSEB. While the MSEB had agreed that the money would be obtained back, no such move had been taken by the state government undertaking, he stated.
