Orissa HC rejects plea seeking refund of recruitment drive's application fee collected in 2014

CUTTACK: The Orissa High Court on Tuesday disposed of a plea seeking a refund of Rs 100 collected by the State government for each of the applications towards a purported Special Recruitment Drive in 2014 as it was never organised.

The Biju Patnaik University of Technology (BPUT) and State Employment and Technical Education and Training (ETET) department had jointly invited registrations for Special Recruitment Drive in 2014 for engineering, MBA, MCA and pharma graduates and postgraduates.

When the purported Special Recruitment Drive initiated through a job fair in Bhubaneswar from September 17 to 20 in 2014 was not organised, a PIL seeking judicial intervention was filed on June 3, 2015.

One Thakur Ranjit Das filed the petition through his counsel Partha Sarathi Nayak. While the notice was issued on the petition to the State government on June 10, 2015, no reply was filed and the matter went without hearing all these years till it came up on Tuesday.

However, the division bench of Chief Justice S Muralidhar and Justice Chittaranjan Dash said, “The present petition has been pending since 2015. The Court is not persuaded to hold that collecting Rs 100 for each of the applications towards the recruitment drive is an unreasonable exercise considering that a lot of arrangements have to be put in place for such a special recruitment drive.”

“It would not be practical for the government to be ordered at this stage more than seven years after the said recruitment drive to locate each of the applicants to refund the application fee collected,” the bench observed.