Daijiworld Media Network - Bengaluru (SP)

Bengaluru, Feb 14: It is reliably learnt that the state has promoted 47 assistant executive engineers working in public works department (PWD), after the Supreme Court (SC) struck down the reservation policy adopted by the state in promoting candidates belonging to scheduled castes and tribes.

However, while the SC order is dated February 11, the orders of promotion are dated February 9. With this promotion order, 47 assistant executive engineers have become executive engineers. Allegedly, 13 of the promotees belong to scheduled and scheduled tribes. The state was expected to revert about 3000 of its employees who were promoted wrongly, and who continued in service as on the date of the SC verdict. Sources claim that those promoted are placed in strategic positions, with one of them discharging duties as officer on special duty for a minister. Some sources claim that these promotions were put through in a hurry for facilitating people in good books of influential persons.

The orders however, have been issued with the condition that they are subject to SC order. At the same time, there are sources which swear that this promotion was affected against the SC directives and it was affected unscientifically.

As per the current norms, reservation for scheduled castes and tribes has been pegged at 18 percent, 32 percent for other backward classes, and 50 percent for other categories including general. But at present, reservation of 40 percent posts of chief engineers, 47 percent in superintendents and 75 percent in executive posts have been given to these categories, it is said. In other departments too the position is almost the same.

M Nagaraj and others, who had approached Supreme Court against giving promotions overwhelmingly in favour of certain categories of employees at the cost of others, had succeeded in convincing the Supreme Court of their arguments, after which the 39-year-old quota system in promotions existing in the state was held to be bad in the eyes of law. It is said that the order of promotion to the current set of employees was issued after the SC verdict, duly making it look like having been issued two days earlier.