Case No: 1869/2001
Court of Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities under Section 59 of the Persons with Disabilities (Equal opportunities, Protection of rights and Full participation) Act, 1995.
CS Sivakumar had a double impairment. He was mobility impaired and had a hearing problem as well. He filed a case in the court stating that the State Bank of India had published an advertisement in the Employment News dated 27 October – 2 November 2001 for various computer related specialist cadre posts ie:
- Asstt Manager (Systems)
- Manager (System Analysis & Design)
- Dy Manager (Networking)
- Dy Manager (Programming – Oracle)
- Dy Manager (Programming -C/C++)
- Systems Administrator
- Manager (Systems).
The Complaint
His plea was that these posts should be reserved for persons with hearing impairments alone. His argument was that 3 percent of the posts of Probationary Officer were reserved for orthopedically handicaped only while no post was primarily reserved for visually and hearing impaired persons.
Thus, according to him and the lawyers representing him, 3 percent of the Specialist Officers posts particularly the computer related ones should be reserved entirely for hearing impaired persons.
The Judgment
The court dismissed the case on the advise that the PWD Act does not categorically make any distinction between the various disabilities for which reservation is to be provided u/s 33 of the Act.
Sivakumar was advised to find out if the 3 percent backlog reservation for persons with disabilities in terms of the instructions issued by Ministry of Finance had been fulfilled and seek employment.