On March 17, the Dr Rajendra Prasad Central Agricultural University issued a notification stating that interested candidates can apply for faculty positions available on campus. However, what was different this year in comparison to previous years was that the University out of the 68 openings only reserved five seats to Dalit candidates instead of 10.
As per the Central University rule on reservation, the quota meant for SC candidates is 15% which means that a total of 10 seats should have been allocated to Dalit candidates alone.
"A total of 68 vacancies were available for the assistant professor's post. Out of which 35 positions were unreserved, 12 positions were earmarked for OBC, five positions were kept for Scheduled Caste and 16 positions including the backlogs (positions not filled in the previous year) were kept reserved for the candidate belonging to Scheduled Tribes. This clearly shows that that the university has not followed the constitutional norms in hiring the Dalit candidate," says Shashi Bhushan, one of the candidates who applied for the post of assistant professor of Biotechnology.
In March, the MHRD directed institutions to consider a department as a unit while hiring the faculty members instead of the university as a unit. But the move was not welcomed by a certain faction of the faculties and this decision was challenged in Supreme Court. Following this on July 19, as per a court ruling, UGC directed all state and central universities to postpone faculty hiring. However, floating this rule, Dr. Rajendra Prasad Central Agricultural University went ahead with the with department.as a unit for hire.
Condemning the university's action, Bhushan in a Facebook post claimed that the exams were conducted in a hasty and non-transparent manner. "Academic score and written exam marks should be considered for selection for interview. But, within one week, the University published written exam results without mentioning the written marks of any candidate and called in people for the interview. The University conducted an interview just after 14 hours of publication of the written exam result," Bhushan said in the post.
He further stated that the university sent the appointment letters only to the selected candidates as opposed to listing the result in their website, "The university sent mail only to selected candidates and asked them to join the post, but it didn’t publish final selection result in a public domain either on the notice board or the website. The overall recruitment process is dubious and proves that the system is non-transparent," he said.
The University was unreachable for a comment.
