MANJUSREE DUTTA Vs. SUJATA DEB ROY

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The appeal is directed against a judgment and order of January 28, 2020 by which the writ petition instituted by the first respondent has succeeded and, in effect, the writ court has held that in view of several previous instances of teachers in government-aided schools having been appointed at a time that they had crossed 35 years of age, the writ petitioner in this case is entitled to the same benefit.

(2.) The facts fall within a short compass. The writ petitioner, the present appellant and several others were engaged by the respondent school, which is government-aided, upon the school's perception that additional teachers, other than the posts sanctioned for the relevant subject, were necessary in view of the number of students in the school. The salary or honorarium or money that is paid to such teachers engaged in addition to the sanctioned posts, is not borne by the State and it is clearly a private affair of a particular school and the extent that it is able to afford to engage teachers outside the posts approved by the government. The government aid comes only in respect of the approved posts. The government is not involved in the process of selection or otherwise of the temporary teachers, nor is any sanction of the government taken for such purpose. Unlike for sanctioned posts, the qualifications for engagement as additional teachers are not fixed by the government.

(3.) In the present case, an advertisement was issued in the year 2014 inviting applications for interested persons to be appointed as a Bengali teacher in the respondent school. The relevant advertisement only required that Bengali should have been a subject in which the candidate received education up to the graduate level. More specifically, the advertisement did not refer to any age.