Education must be left to educationists, said the Supreme Court on Monday while setting aside an Allahabad HC verdict of 2018. According to the High Court’s judgment, a person with an MEd qualification cannot get an appointment as an assistant professor for the subject of education. This controversy centred around whether an MEd degree should be treated as an equivalent degree to MA (Education) for appointment to the post of an assistant professor as published in March 2014 by the Uttar Pradesh Higher Education Service Selection Commission (UPHESSC).
How the Allahabad HC verdict came about
The dispute in the appeal decided on Monday turned on a later recruitment round. Advertisement No. 47 of 2016 sought assistant professors in several subjects, including a hundred posts in education, and set two conditions: a score of 55 per cent in the relevant subject at postgraduate level, and a pass in the National Eligibility Test or a state-level eligibility test, according to the Supreme Court’s judgment in Anand Yadav and others v State of Uttar Pradesh, written by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul. The last date for applications was 14 July 2016. The commission’s corrigendum admitting MEd holders was issued on 11 July, three days earlier.
The expert panel whose advice produced that corrigendum was drawn from four universities: Professor Bhoo Dev Singh, dean of the education department at Banaras Hindu University, Professor P.C. Shukla of the same department, Professor Amita Bhajpayee of Lucknow University and Professor P.K. Sahu of Allahabad University. Professor Bhoo Dev Singh pointed out that candidates with either degree sat the same National Eligibility Test, on the same day and with the same paper, and received a certificate that named only the subject, education, according to the judgment.
The UPHESSC was assisted by an expert panel of four educationists who said that for the post of assistant professor (teaching), Faculty of Arts, both M.Ed. and MA (Education) should be acceptable. Based on this opinion, the employing authority UPHESSC thus came out with an erratum on July 11, 2016, which permitted candidates possessing the two degrees to compete for said posts.
However, a Division Bench of the Allahabad High Court, on May 14, 2018, held the opinion that while MA (Education) is a Master’s degree in the subject concerned, MEd is not so, as it is only a training qualification. The conclusion was that an MEd qualified person should not be appointed to the post of assistant professor in education. Consequently, the erratum dated July 11, 2016, was abandoned, the High Court had held.
The Supreme Court noted that the Allahabad HC verdict leaned on an earlier Supreme Court decision, Dr. Prit Singh v S.K. Mangal of 1993, as followed by the Himachal Pradesh High Court in 2014, and that neither the University Grants Commission (UGC) nor the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), the two bodies competent on the question, had been made parties before the High Court. Nor had any of the candidates who would be affected.
After the High Court ruling, the UPHESSC decided at a meeting on 5 September 2018 to treat only MA (Education) holders as eligible. On an appeal by MEd candidates, the Supreme Court let them sit the examination provisionally: 6,793 candidates were called for the written test on 12 January 2019, interviews ran from 18 to 27 February 2020, and the results were kept undeclared pending the appeal.
A bench comprising Justices S K Kaul, Aniruddha Bose, and Krishna Murari found the High Court’s verdict faulty and set it aside by allowing the appeal of a candidate- Anand Yadav. “We say so since matters of education must be left to educationists, of course, subject to being governed by the relevant statutes and regulations. It is not the function of this Court to sit as an expert body over the decision of the experts, especially when the experts are all eminent people as apparent from the names as set out,” the bench said.
“We are, thus, of the view that the impugned judgment is not sustainable and has to be set aside, and the challenge to the corrigendum dated July 11, is repelled. The result having already been computed and awaiting declaration should now be declared forthwith so that persons looking for employment, as per the requisite eligibility criteria, can be employed. So that the students have the benefit of education from the persons so employed,” it said.
What the regulators told the court
The two national regulators took a different view from the Allahabad HC verdict once they were brought into the case. The UGC told the court in an affidavit that both MA (Education) and MEd are specified as master’s level degrees, but that it does not decide whether degrees are equivalent; that is the NCTE’s role. An NCTE expert committee, chaired by Professor Mohammed Miyan, a former vice-chancellor of Maulana Azad National Urdu University, met on 27 and 28 September 2018 and concluded that “M.Ed. is a masters’ degree” which the UGC and the NCTE recognise for appointment as an assistant professor in education, the judgment records.
The committee distinguished the two courses rather than treating them as identical: MA (Education) is a two-year disciplinary degree focused on theory, while the MEd is a one-year professional programme that can only be taken after a BEd, so that it also takes two years after a first degree. The bench, which also included Justices Aniruddha Bose and Krishna Murari, said that equivalence only arises when two degrees are different, and that the employer, the UGC and the NCTE had all accepted it here. “It is neither for the contesting party, i.e., respondent No.3, nor for this Court to sit as a court of appeal over the decision of the experts,” it said.
What the ruling settles, and what it leaves alone
The judgment upholds the corrigendum of 11 July 2016, so MEd holders who applied in the 2016 round remain eligible for the education posts, and it directs that the result already computed be declared. It does not reopen the earlier 2014 selection under Advertisement No. 46. In a companion appeal, Sushil Kumar Pandey and others v State of Uttar Pradesh, the same bench declined “to open the whole selection process of 2014, which already stands completed” and dismissed the appeal, confining its ruling to the 2016 process.
The national rule on qualifications points the same way. The UGC’s 2018 regulations on minimum qualifications for teachers, which apply to education alongside the arts, humanities and sciences, require an assistant professor to hold a master’s degree with 55 per cent marks “in a concerned/relevant/allied subject”, together with the NET or an accredited state test, with an exemption for candidates holding a PhD awarded under the UGC’s rules, according to the regulations as published in the Gazette of India. Who decides whether a particular degree counts as relevant was, in the end, the question the Allahabad HC verdict had answered for itself and the Supreme Court handed back to the experts.
