Daijiworld Media Network - Bengaluru (SP)

Bengaluru, Mar 29: The state government, with no other option left, has decided to fall in line with the Supreme Court verdict delivered in February last year, holding reservation-based promotions given by the state government to employees belonging to scheduled castes and tribes as illegal. With this, about 20,000 employees may get demoted while a large number of employees in other categories will get promotions.

The hopes of employees, who have been waiting for their seniority-based promotions, have been rekindled with this development. The efforts of the state government, which had tried its best to somehow get a favourable order through the Supreme Court under various pretexts, have come to naught. As such, it has withdrawn an order it had issued in the past, staying the promotion of different groups of employees. The said order was withdrawn on the very day of which model code of conduct came into being. It has ordered publication of the matter of revision of seniority list in the gazette and to send the copies thereof to the department of personnel and administrative reforms.

The government, which was dilly-dallying in the implementation of the order of the Supreme Court as it would have created problems for employees belonging to scheduled castes and tribes who got promoted on the basis of reservation, is in a bind as the Supreme Court has given only one month to implement its order.

It may be recalled that the Supreme Court had quashed an act the state government had enacted in 2002 to give reservation-based promotions to scheduled castes and tribes employees on February 9, 2017, and asked it to give promotions to other eligible employees. The government had recently drafted another bill to serve the interests of employees facing demotions but the bill is now pending with the President. After the employees moved Supreme Court through a contempt of court petition, the court had ordered the verdict to be implemented before April 25, failing which the chief secretary of the state has to be present in the court during the next hearing. Although no exact figure about the number of people who will be reverted now is available, as per estimates, it might be somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000.