- (1.) The first petitioner, West Bengal College Librarian Association (WBCLA in short) is a duly registered society and the second petitioner, Arun Kumar Ghatak is the General Secretary of the said Association.
(2.) The petitioners initiated the writ proceedings, W. P. No. 1916 of 2005 in this Court as representatives of the librarians serving in various nongovernment colleges, which are affiliated to different Universities in the State, primarily claiming the status of the librarians of Non-Government Colleges as teachers and on that basis the same service conditions as that of the teaching staff of all such colleges in the State. Before initiation of the present writ proceedings the petitioners, however, visited this Court with an earlier writ petition, W. P. No. 1569 of 2003, inter alia, claiming that the service conditions of the librarians of Non-Government Colleges in the State should be similar to the teaching staff or rather the teachers of such Non-Government Colleges and the said writ petition culminated in an order in which this Court observed (Bhaskar Bhattacharya, J.) that "whether the members of the first petitioner should be given the status of teaching staff is a question which is premature at this stage so long the service conditions are not framed". After making the above observations the Court was pleased to dispose of the writ petition with certain specific directions, for the sake of convenience the directions with which the writ petition was disposed of on 2 April 2006 by this Court are set out below:- "I thus, propose to dispose of this writ application by directing the State respondents to immediately constitute a committee of experts for the purpose of framing the conditions of service of librarians. While framing such service conditions, the committee will give an opportunity of hearing to the representatives of the petitioner no.1 and also take into consideration the various recommendations already given by other committees or experts in the past and will also examine various other conditions of service prevailing any other universities in India. Over and above, the committee will also bear in mind the principle of equal pay for equal work while framing such conditions of service.
(3.) The committee should be formed within a month from today and such committee will give its recommendation to the State Government within three months from the formation of such committee. After submission of such report, the State Government will take step for implementation of the committee s report with such variation it thinks fit and proper within a further period of two months.;