Jahanvi Agarwal
Recently, Vinayak Kashid who is a transgender postgraduate in electrical engineering, filed a petition with the Maharashtra State Electricity Transmission Company Limited (MahaTransco), asking for a change to a May 2022 recruitment advertisement. The petition was being heard by a division bench consisting of Acting Chief Justice Nitin Jamdar and Justice Sandeep V. Marne.
A government resolution (GR) establishing a third window for transgender people in public work and education was released on March 3. Additionally, he had stated that a new general requirement (GR) had been issued to form a committee to write regulations and policies; the expert group, which was made up of secretaries from several departments and psychologists, would provide its recommendation within two months.
The administration had opposed the Maharashtra Administrative Tribunal’s (MAT) directive to add a “third gender” option to all hiring processes for the home department. This was another issue that AG Saraf had brought up. He had stated that the change to the police recruitment rules establishing the physical requirements for transgender people would be enacted within a week.
The Court in December last year had ordered the government to develop transgender recruiting policies in accordance with the 2020 Rules by February 28, 2023. The 2020 Rules outlined the steps to take in order to identify transgender people for work and instructed the states to develop policies to put the rule into effect within two years.
The High Court had made reference to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the National Legal Services Authority v. Union of India[1] case from 2014, which recognized a number of rights for the transgender population and mandated those states reserve seats for transgender people in positions of authority.
The Supreme Court had ordered the federal and state governments to take action to consider transgender people as members of the socially and educationally underprivileged classes of citizens and to grant them all forms of accommodations when applying for admission to educational institutions and jobs in the public sector. On March 20, the High Court called upon the government for failing to act on a reservation for transgender people despite more than eight years have passed since the SC’s ruling.
Case Name: Vinayak Bhagwan Kashid vs MESTCL
Bench: Chief Justice Nitin Jamdar and Justice Sandeep V. Marne
[1] (2014) 5 SCC 438