Female teachers aged above 50 and male teachers above 55 cannot be treated as ‘excess teachers’ in law for redeployment in other schools: Karnataka High Court
Female teachers aged above 50 and male teachers aged above 55 are exempted in law from being considered “excess teachers” during the process of rationalisation of teachers and redeployment to other schools, the High Court of Karnataka has said.
Also, the court said the authorities are duty-bound to give effect to this beneficial provision, in Section 10(1)(vi) of the Karnataka State Civil Services (Regulation of Transfer of Teachers) Act, 2020, as this statutory provision in its contemplation cast a positive duty on the State authorities to give the benefit to the eligible teachers, and not treat them as excess.
A Division Bench comprising Chief Justice N.V. Anjaria and Justice S.G. Pandit passed the order while dismissing the appeals filed by the State government’s Department of School Education.
The department had challenged the orders passed by the Karnataka State Administrative Tribunal, which had set aside the department’s action of transferring two women teachers, Umadevi Hundrkar and Prabhavati Ronad, to other schools for the reason that they were excess teachers in their respective government high schools in Bagalkot district.
Whenever a beneficial provision is incorporated in the statute, the Bench said, it has to be given effect to in favour of the beneficiaries by the authorities concerned, irrespective of the aspect whether the beneficiary has made an application in that regard or not.
The “statutory provision of the kind and nature as found in Section 10(1)(vi) of the Act of 2020 becomes a right of the employee teacher to be governed and to be benefited thereby,” the Bench observed.
The two women teachers could not have been declared as ‘excess teachers’ and the order of their transfer could not have been issued by the authorities, the Bench said while noticing that they were treated as ‘excess teachers’ and transferred despite their representation pointing out the provision in the Act.
While upholding the tribunal’s order, the Bench said the tribunal had rightly pointed out that providing age-based exemption is an established practice and the decision-making authority should have considered their reasonable, legitimate, and valid request articulated through representation which they had submitted in time.
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