Madras High Court upholds order on show-cause notice to Annamalai Univ staff

Hearing a batch of writ petitions by the non-teaching staff members of Annamalai University, the bench comprising Justice Pushpa Sathyanarayana and Justice Krishnan Ramasamy upheld the single judge’s order dated March 5, 2019.

It noted that the issue was pending at the show-cause notice stage itself for years, and directed the staff to respond to the notice within two weeks.

After the State government took over the university in 2013, the Vice-Chancellor had sent notices to thousands of non-teaching staff in August 2018, as to why their pay scales should not be lowered. Challenging it, around 400 writ petitions were filed before the High Court. However, the single judge who heard the petitions had dismissed them and upheld the university’s decision.

The appellants argued that the notices in question disclosed premeditation or bias and therefore violative of Article 14 of the Constitution. However, the bench rejected the contentions citing that there was no personal ill-will related to any specific person.

“There is no personal ill-will attributed to a specific person. Accordingly, this court is unable to find any traces of premeditated mind on the part of the university from the reading of the show-cause notices, which are mere notices affording opportunity to the appellants to respond to the proposal contained in them,” the bench noted.

The court also held that there was nothing wrong in the single-judge’s order.

“We do not find any error in the orders of the single judge, which are impugned in these writ appeals, as there is no merit in these appeals and accordingly, these appeals are dismissed as devoid of merits,” the judges said.