CHENNAI: A vacation bench of the Madras High Court has stayed the operation of an order of a single judge dismissing the writ petitions of school teachers seeking to restrain the government from terminating their services for not passing through the teacher eligibility test (TET) and asking the authorities concerned to issue show cause notices asking why their services should not be terminated.
The bench of Justices C V Karthikeyan and Krishnan Ramasamy, which granted the relief while passing interim orders on a batch of writ appeals on Thursday, directed the unsuccessful candidates/teachers to write the TET, scheduled to be held on June 8 and 9. Till then no action should be taken against them, the bench said and posted the matter for further hearing in the second week of June.
While dismissing a writ petition from the teachers of a school in Tiruvannamalai district in the last week of April, Justice S M Subramaniam had directed the authorities competent to initiate appropriate action under the Rules for discharging the teachers by issuing show cause notices (SCNs) after setting out the reasons. Even the Centre in its letter dated February 27 this year to the State School Education secretary had categorically stated that the time limit for completion of the training programme for in-service untrained elementary teachers is March 31, as mandated by the amendment made to the RTE Act by the Parliament. Hence, it would not be possible to consider any request related to extension of deadline for training of untrained in- service elementary teachers, Justice Subramaniam had said.
The appellants said that they did not find any amendment to the RTE Act as observed by the single judge in his order. He ought to have directed the authorities to produce the said amendment fixing March 31 last as the dead line for passing the TET. The judge ought to have noted that the Teachers Recruitment Board (TRB) has not yet announced the date for written exam in its notification No. 8 of 2019. In the absence of a date prior to March 31, it is impossible for the appellants to pass the TET before March 31, they contended.
Meanwhile, the state government announced the dates for the TET on June 8 and 9.
Hence, the vacation bench stayed the single judge order, directed the teachers to participate in the TET on June 8 and 9 and restrained the authorities from taking any adverse action against them till then.