Orissa high court washes hands of CMC job scam

CUTTACK: The Orissa high court on Monday refused to proceed with the case involving 274 fake appointments in the Cuttack Municipal Corporation (CMC), shrugging off the 15-year-old PIL on the job scam.
The high court expressed disinclination to proceed after the petitioner said there was no need to include the beneficiaries of the scam as parties to the case.
The court made it clear that the question of follow-up action on the cancellation of the illegal appointments in the CMC by the state could not be taken up without arraying the affected employees as parties to the case.
The illegal appointments in the civic body related to different categories of the posts of sweeper, road gang, drain gang, de-weeding coolies, teacher, etc. There was neither any valid selection nor any valid appointment.
The scam surfaced in June 2003 when the civic administration detected a large number of employees drawing salaries without any valid appointment since 1998. City-based social activist Pradip Sahoo filed an PIL in the same year, seeking a CBI probe.
The PIL led to the cancellation of 274 illegal appointments in the CMC by the state urban development department on March 16, 2015, with a direction to the municipal commissioner to take follow-up action.
When the case was taken up last on January 21, the petitioner said no termination orders had followed the cancellation of the appointments and the erring officials involved in the scam had not been punished.
The court, however, on that day directed the petitioner's counsel to make the affected employees parties to the case to proceed further with the PIL.
When the case came up on Monday, the petitioner filed an affidavit stating that one Rajendra Prasad Singh, said to be president of Cuttack Mehentar Sangh, was already arrayed as the opposite party and was prosecuting the case on behalf of the affected employees. "So there is no need to array all the affected employees as parties," the petitioner contended in the affidavit.
"Taking note of this along with the case records, the division bench of chief justice K S Jhaveri and justice K R Mohapatra expressed disinclination to proceed further with the case and disposed of the PIL," petitioner counsel Radharaman Dasnayak told TOI.