Cancel appointments made during Senthilbalaji’s tenure as Transport Minister in 2014, Madras High Court urged

V. Senthilbalaji. File
| Photo Credit: PTI

Close on the heels of V. Senthilbalaji resigning from the State Cabinet on Sunday (April 27, 2025), the Tamil Nadu government is facing yet another court case, seeking the cancellation of all alleged illegal appointments made by the Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) in Chennai during his tenure as Transport Minister in Jayalalithaa’s Cabinet in 2014.

A Division Bench of Justices R. Subramanian and G. Arul Murugan would hear on Monday (April 28, 2025) a batch of writ appeals filed by unsuccessful candidates to set aside the appointments made to the posts of Junior Engineer and Assistant Engineer in the MTC in 2015, on the basis of the 2014 recruitment notification, and instead consider them for those posts.

According to the appellants before the Division Bench, all of them were either degree or diploma-holders in the relevant engineering disciplines and had also undergone one-year apprenticeship under the recognised workshops of the State Transport Corporations, thereby qualifying them to be appointed as Junior Engineers/Assistant Engineers in the MTC.

When the MTC issued a recruitment notification on November 2, 2014, calling for applications for the posts of Junior Engineer and Assistant Engineer, the appellants had participated in the recruitment process but did not find their names in the final selection list released in 2015. They did not raise any objection then, presuming that the selection was done fairly, though 33 appointments were made for the post of Junior Engineer, despite only 13 vacancies having been notified.

However, much later, they came to know about the job racket wing of the Chennai Central Crime Branch (CCB) police having registered a First Information Report (FIR) in 2015 against various individuals over alleged irregularities in the entire appointment process. During the course of the investigation, some of the appellants were also summoned by the police for inquiry.

It was only when the police showed the marks obtained by the selected candidates to them during the course of the inquiry, the appellants learnt about the manipulation of the mark list and therefore, chose to file a batch of writ petitions before the High Court in 2021 to nullify the entire selection list and seeking a direction to MTC to prepare a fresh list by considering their names too.

The CCB filed a counter affidavit to the writ petitions in 2021 itself confirming that it had even filed a chargesheet before a special court for MP/MLA cases in Chennai and that the case was pending trial. However, when the writ petitions were taken up for final hearing in 2024, the MTC opposed the plea made by the writ petitioners to upset the entire selection list.

The corporation stated that the criminal proceedings were yet to be concluded and hence, the appointments made in 2015 could not be set aside by the court in 2024 merely on the basis of the petitioners’ averments in their affidavits. It also said, the petitioners’ plea suffered from laches since the 2015 appointments had been challenged only in 2021 after a delay of six years.

Some of the candidates, who were selected in 2015, told the court that their employment in the MTC for nearly 10 years could not be disturbed all of sudden solely because of the pending criminal case. On the other hand, the writ petitioners urged the court to reject the contentions of MTC and the selected candidates and instead issue a direction to MTC to also pay compensation for having denied public jobs to the petitioners since 2015.

After hearing all of them, Justice Vivek Kumar Singh disposed of all the writ petitions on December 13, 2024, with a direction to MTC to consider the grievances ventilated by the petitioners. Aggrieved over such an order, the petitioners had filed the present writ appeals contending that the single judge ought to have granted the relief they sought for and not relegated them to MTC.