AMC school board appointments scrapped

Times of India: Ahmedabad: Thursday, October 25, 2018.

The appointment of four assistant administrators and five trained graduate supervisors for the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) school board has been put on hold. Municipal commissioner Vijay Nehra had found that the required permission for the appointments had not been taken and that 16% of the questions in the written test were incorrect.

This is the second instance of these appointments being frozen. A senior AMC officer said that in 2016, the process to fill up the nine posts had been initiated, but was called off as there were few takers.

The officer said that the procedure was set in motion again in 2018. In all, 5,000-odd candidates applied for the posts. A written examination was conducted and later it was found that eight questions had major errors. The questions pertained to the Right to Education Act (RTE) but the AMC had erroneously replaced RTE with RTI, the Right to Information Act. The question paper carried 50 marks.

The officer said that when the interviews were to be conducted, a file was moved to invite the deputy municipal commissioner and commissioner for the selections. At that stage it became clear that the required permission had not been taken by the AMC school board officials.

The municipal commissioner issued an order scrapping the process. "The candidates who have applied will be required to take the written examination again and then they will be shortlisted. The AMC will not issue any fresh advertisements," an official said.

The leader of the opposition in the AMC, Dinesh Sharma, said that the procedure was nixed because of a letter he had written to the municipal commissioner.