Odisha Sun Times Bureau:
Bhubaneswar, Jan 6:

The Odisha High Court on Monday posted the next hearing of the case related to irregularities in Odisha Civil Services (OCS)-2006 recruitment on January 20.

high court

While adjudicating the case, a division bench comprising Justice Amitava Roy and Justice A K Rath asked the state government and other petitioners to present their arguments on the next scheduled date.

Earlier, the high court had stayed the State Administrative Tribunal (SAT) order in which it had scrapped the OCS recruitment terming it unconstitutional. A division bench of SAT comprising Justice Nityananda Prusty and administrative member S N Das had declared all 378 appointments in OCS-2006 void for alleged irregularities. The bench had said in its verdict that it violates the Sec 14 and 16 of Constitution.

Challenging the SAT order, the state government and many candidates had moved High Court for relief.

It may be mentioned here that the OPSC, in an advertisement published in 2006, had invited applications from eligible candidates to fill up a total of 378 Class-II posts in several cadres, including Odisha Administrative Service (OAS) and Odisha Finance Service (OFS).

However, after several hiccups, the recruitment process was completed in 2010 in which the state government gave appointment to 73 successful candidates as OAS (Class-I) and 207 candidates as OFS (Class-I) officers while another 98 candidates were absorbed in other allied cadres as Class-II officers.