A day after DMK’s Karur strongman V. Senthil Balaji quit as the minister from the M.K. Stalin-led cabinet, yet another legal tangle looms large targeting him. A batch of writ petitions have been filed seeking the cancellation of all illegal appointments made by the Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) when Senthil Balaji served as the transport minister under Jayalalithaa between 2011- 2014.
The Madras High Court division bench comprising Justices R. Subramanian and G. Arul Murugan on Monday reserved the orders on the batch of writ petitions filed by the unsuccessful candidates who did not get job in the transport department, between 2014 and 2015, when Senthil Balaji served as the minister. The petitions sought to set aside the appointments made to the post of Junior Engineer in the MTC based on the 2014 recruitment notification.
The petitioners sought the division bench to declare all the appointments as illegal as most of them who applied for the post of junior engineers were either degree or diploma holders, but did not get the job. The appellants said that they underwent a one-year apprenticeship under recognised workshops of the transport corporations and qualified as per the recruitment act and applied for the jobs on November 2, 2014, based on the recruitment notification, but did not get the appointments. Their names did not appear in the final list published in 2015. But they believed that the selection process was based on merit and they did not fulfil the job expectations. The appellants said that they realised only later after the Chennai Central Crime Branch (CCB) investigation that there were irregularities in the appointment process, as some of them were summoned for police enquiry during the investigation.
The appellants had earlier in 2021 filed a batch of writ petitions before the Madras High Court for which a counter affidavit was filed by the CCB then. The CCB said that the charge sheet has been filed in the Special Court for MP/MLAs and the trial is pending. The transport corporation in its reply in the Madras High Court during the final hearing in 2024 said that the appointments cannot be set aside due to the delay. Following this, the single judge bench with Justice Vivek Kumar Singh of the Madras High Court in December 2024, disposed of all the writ petitions, with a direction to the MTC to consider the grievances ventilated by the petitioners.
And now, after six months the petitioners have again approached the Madras High Court with a writ appeal against the order passed by the single judge.
