Visually-handicapped women participate in a rally in Delhi. (PTI file picture)

Chennai, Aug. 22: A week after winning a landmark Supreme Court judgment for the blind, a strange predicament stares at Amitha.

The apex court had ruled that the visually impaired are entitled to appear for the Banking Service Probationary Officers exam with other general candidates. However, the Banking Services Recruitment Board (BSRB) here, which was directed to allow Amitha to sit for the test, does not exist anymore.

It wound up operations more than two years ago and public sector banks have moved into the era of individual recruitments.

“Technically, it is the BSRB which should implement the Supreme Court’s order, but it is not there now,” said a top official of the Chennai-based Indian Overseas Bank, which had placed an indent with the board to recruit probationary officers in 2002.

The BSRB had then apparently disallowed Amitha from sitting for the exam and she moved the Supreme Court.

“We are not really a party to the case,” the bank official said, adding that it was a case between Amitha and the Union of India. “We do not even have the address of Amitha as the BSRB was maintaining the biodata records of all the applicants,” he said.

While the case was going on, the bank received queries from the finance ministry regarding its recruitment process only a couple of times, the official added.

The BSRB office has closed down. “The board moved out more than two years ago from here,” said the present occupant of the second-floor space in the building that earlier housed the board.

Sources said Indian Bank, a nationalised bank, was managing the BSRB office in Chennai but there is no clue as to where all the records of the defunct board have been moved.

The Indian Overseas Bank said that since it had asked the board to recruit probationary officers in 2002, “in future, if Amitha applies for the same post, we will take care of it”.

Amitha, however, could not be contacted as her name is missing from the registers of two associations for graduate blind students. Neither the Government School for the Blind in suburban Poonamallee nor Little Flower Convent, the largest aided private school for the visually handicapped, could confirm from their records when Amitha had passed.