In a relief to the Uttar Pradesh government, a Division Bench the Allahabad High Court on Friday stayed an order that halted the recruitment of 69,000 basic assistant teachers.
The government had challenged a June 3 order by a single-judge Bench of the same court through a special appeal.
“Pending notice, the operation and effect of impugned order...shall remain stayed, until further orders of this court”, Justices Dinesh Kumar Singh and Pawan Kumar Jaiswal noted in an order dated June 12.
The order had been earlier reserved.
The court, however, said the government could proceed in terms of the Supreme Court order of June 9 passed on a special leave petition, under which 37,339 posts would have to be kept vacant for “siksha mitras”, while the remaining could be filled up.
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A lawyer for one of the petitioners in the special appeal hearing told The Hindu that the stay by the Division Bench essentially meant that the government could now proceed with counselling for the post that was scheduled from June 3 but was halted due to the stay by the single-judge Bench.
The single-judge Bench of Justice Alok Mathur had observed that there had been a “material error” in the evaluation.
The court had provided interim relief to a number of candidates who challenged the results of the recruitment exam citing discrepancies in some objective-style questions and their answers.
The court stayed the May 8 notification, under which the final answer key to the examination was issued. The court was hearing a bunch of petitions that had challenged the result of the Assistant Teacher Recruitment Examination 2019, dated May 13 declared by the Examination Regulatory Authority of Uttar Pradesh. The petitioners had objected to the ‘final answer key’ issued for the exam. They contended that while certain questions were erroneous, some answers were incorrect, some questions extremely ambiguous and few of them debatable and argumentative with no single correct answer.
