Press "Enter" to skip to content

Madras HC stays publishing of postal jobs exam results over language row

The Madras High Court restrained the Department of Posts’ from publishing results of the recruitment examinations which are to be conducted on Sunday.

A division bench of Justices K Ravichandrababu and R Mahadevan issued orders late on Saturday on a petition filed by I Aseervatham, the State Coordinator of People Watch, an organization working for the protection of human rights in Tamil Nadu.

The petition stated that the Department of Posts had passed the amendment to restrict the examination language to Hindi and English just three days before the date of examination and had also not publicized this change. The exam was scheduled to recruit multi tasking staff, postman, mail guard, postal assistant and sorting assistant. “Till last year, candidates were allowed to take the exams in any of the 15 languages provided including Tamil,” the petition alleged.

Explaining that the educational qualifications required to appear for this examination is passing class 10 and 12 exams, the petition stated that it would be unfair to expect those candidates to write the postal recruitment test in English and Hindi. “Majority of the applicants would have studied only in schools where medium of instructions is in local languages,” the petition pointed out.

Alleging that the ‘right to life’ and the ‘right to employment’ are deprived for those who do not know English or Hindi, the petition added that changing the language of the exam in the last minute would deny employment opportunity to thousands of people. Requesting the court to intervene and issue an interim injunction to prevent the department from conducting the exam on the scheduled date.

The petition also requested the court to order the department to restore the earlier notification which allowed the candidates to write the test in local languages.

Source: The News Minute