The Hindu : National : Retrenchment of SC/ST staff challenged

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Jan 11, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

National

National

Retrenchment of SC/ST staff challenged

Legal Correspondent

Employee performance wrongly evaluated

“Management not following the social obligation”
VSNL pursuing an arbitrary policy: samiti

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday issued notice to the Centre and Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. on a petition challenging retrenchment of a large number of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes employees after the Union government divested 25 per cent stake in the VSNL, when it was a public sector undertaking.

A Bench of Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan and Justice R.V. Raveendran also issued notice to the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes on the petition seeking a direction to the authorities to stop further retrenchment of SC/ST employees.

The petitioner, Videsh Sanchar Nigam SC/ST Welfare Samiti, alleged that company’s staff members belonging to SCs/STs were under threat of termination as the performance of 75 per cent of them had been wrongly evaluated as unsatisfactory or marginal. It said: “The evaluation did not follow scientific criteria, but have been mala fide designed to retrench the services of majority of the existing employees, who have been inherited by a strategic partner along with a 25 per cent stake.”

It submitted that after the divestment, the company management was not following the social obligation of providing sufficient job opportunities to SCs/STs. It pointed out that the VSNL had given an undertaking to the Centre that the safeguard for SC/ST employees would continue after the disinvestment, but it was now following an arbitrary and discriminatory policy.”

The petitioner alleged that the decision to retrench the employees belonging to weaker sections of society was informal and due to this, the company had retained only 194 old employees who were either employees at the time of the Overseas Communication Service, Government of India or at the time when the VSNL was a public sector company. The government was still holding majority stake.

“Safeguard rights”

It said that the company had recruited a large number of new employees and there was no representation for members of the SC/ST categories, and the percentage of such employees had come down to 4.2 per cent. It sought a direction to safeguard the fundamental rights of the SC/ST employees as per the undertakings given in 2001 and 2002.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National