Agartala, May 29 : The division bench of Gauhati High Court’s Agartala bench today stayed reservation of seats in NIT Agartala unless the tangle over the OBC quota was sorted out by a competent authority through proper notification.
Justices B.D. Agarwal and Maibam B.K. Singh passed the order today on a case filed jointly by the Tripura Nath Kalyan Samity and three students. In their order, the division bench observed that the dispute over reservation for the OBC students could be settled only if a “competent authority”, which means that the Union ministry of human resource development, issues an appropriate notification listing beneficiaries of reservation. “After the high court order, the ball is now in the court of the Union government though aggrieved parties may move the Supreme Court,” said senior advocate Arun Kanti Bhowmik.
He added that according to the court order even students of Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities could not be given reservation in the next academic year commencing from June.
Tracing the origin of the case to denial of reservation benefits to the OBC students for two successive years in 2007 and 2008, on the ground that the college is located in areas under the Autonomous District Council (ADC), Bhowmik said the legality of the stand is open to question.
He said last year the former director of the NIT, S.C. Saha, enforced reservation for SC and ST students in accordance with the formula followed by the Centre but the OBC students remained deprived.
The Nath Kalyan Samity, apex organisation of the OBCs in Tripura, and three deprived students had filed a case last year challenging the move.
The final judgement on the case was pronounced today by the division bench of Guwahati High Court. Advocate Bhowmik said he had tried taken the position that the NIT Agartala “which is an upgraded version of the erstwhile Tripura Engineering College” had been set up in 1965 in an area which passed under the ADC based on 6th Schedule only in the year 1985-a good 20 years later.
“Tripura had got an engineering college where students from all over the Northeast would come to study on quota whereas Manipur was given a medical college in the same year where students from all over the region would go to study on the basis of quota. Naturally the present NIT Agartala cannot be identified as an institution under the ADC based on the 6th Schedule,” Bhowmik said.
He added that under the 6th Schedule, an ADC is empowered to arrange for education of students in schools up to Class V and there was no question of the ADC running an engineering college, let alone an NIT.
Sources in the CPM refused to comment on the issue before seeing the copy of the court order while official sources in NIT Agartala said that they would bring the matter to the notice of the HRD ministry.
