Orissa High Court quashes faculty merger plan
By Express News Service
CUTTACK: The Orissa High Court on Tuesday quashed the notification issued by the School and Mass Education division for merger of colleges on March 11, 2020. The judgment comes at a time when round 4,500 faculties from among the many practically 16,000 recognized for amalgamation have already been merged.
The single choose bench of Justice BR Sarangi quashed the March 11, 2020 notification whereas permitting a batch of 168 petitions. Justice Sarangi directed the division to revive the place of the colleges in query as earlier than and supply vital infrastructure for clean operating of the identical.
“Instead of finding the reasons for decreasing roll strength, merger of school will not serve the purpose. It is just like without finding the cause of disease, treatment has been started. There are innumerable reasons for decreasing of roll strength. Instead of eradicating the ground difficulties, merger has taken place due to decision taken at higher level without realising the ground level reality”, Justice Sarangi noticed.
Faced with the massive setback, official sources mentioned the division will transfer the Supreme Court in opposition to the judgment. The ruling got here on petitions that had challenged the merger notification on the bottom that it violated the Odisha Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Rules, 2010. The petitioners had identified that clause (a) of sub-rule 1 of Rule-6 prescribed {that a} faculty educating college students of Class I to V must be established inside a strolling distance of 1 km of the neighbourhood.
HC quashes faculty merger plan
The Court endorsed the competition of the petitioners that the choice to merge authorities major faculties with UP faculties is very arbitrary as that will put the babies into nice issue. As per the notification, faculties with college students lower than 40 have been to be merged with larger close by faculties generally known as lead faculties. As per the plan, integration of major, UP and excessive faculties with the close by larger faculties will guarantee totally useful faculties with improve in variety of academics per class and concentrated funding of sources, it said.
