HC cannot take over role of an employer: Division bench
Times of India | 19 July 2024
Kolkata: The court cannot appropriate an employer’s role, said a Calcutta High Court division bench while hearing an assistant teacher’s plea against a single-judge bench order in a transfer case.
The HC said the govt should decide whether the grounds of transfer sought by a teacher was reasonable or not, stressing this was required for smooth administration of the education system.
The assistant teacher, Dipti Biswas, had sought a transfer, citing her home was in Kolkata, which was 129km from her workplace in Murshidabad. The chairman of the district primary school council in Murshidabad did not take any action in processing the application. She had moved an HC single bench, which had said her grounds for seeking the transfer was not “good” and rejected her plea. The teacher then challenged it and moved the HC. The HC division bench of Justice Harish Tandon and Justice Prasenjit Biswas on July 9 set aside the single-bench order, calling it “unwarranted”. The bench stressed it was the state, and not the HC, that should decide on a transfer application.
Dipti had moved the appeal, alleging apathetic approach by the authorities towards the application for transfer, given the distance between her school and residence. Advocate Shuvro Prokash Lahiri said the one-way distance between Dipti’s home and workplace was 129 km, which was inconvenient for her. Dipti’s husband, along with their six-year-old child, lives in Kolkata and that she could not provide any maternal care to her child.
Since the online portal, Utsashree, where state schoolteachers can apply for transfers, was suspended, Dipti had submitted an offline transfer application on Feb 19 and Feb 28. The HC had earlier allowed offline transfers. But it was not acted on.
The HC division bench directed the council chairman to forward the transfer application to the secretary of the West Bengal Board of Primary Education within a week. The secretary was directed to dispose of the application within five weeks.