Employees outside the SIET main gate. Telegraph picture

Cuttack, June 12: Orissa High Court has issued a contempt notice to the school and mass education department’s commissioner-cum-secretary Usha Padhee on a petition filed in connection with State Institute of Educational Technology (SIET), Bhubaneswar.

SIET is one of the seven such institutes set up in the country with central assistance in 1986 to develop programmes for providing quality education through the electronic media at primary and secondary levels.

The school and education department issued closure of the institute on April 29, 2013 and ordered the disengagement of the 21 employees of the autonomous institution from that day.

Sukadev Prusty 10 other employees of the SIET, Bhubaneswar, filed a writ petition challenging the closure order and disengaging them instead of absorbing them in some department of the state government.

The high court had issued an interim stay on the closure order. Sukadev and others had filed the contempt petition before the vacation court alleging violation of the stay order.

The single-judge vacation court of Justice A.K. Rath adjourned the contempt case and it would be taken up after the summer vacation, counsel Abhijit Patnaik said today.

The court has issued a notice to the commissioner-cum-secretary of the department of school and mass education to file the response. Patnaik said the contempt petition was filed citing “handing over the SIET building at Bhubaneswar to Rashtriya Madhyamik Shikdha Abhijan and stopping payment of salaries to the employees”.

The court, in its interim order, had said if the state was proposing to close down the SIET, such order of closing down of the said institution should not be implemented without leave of the court.

The state government had issued the closure order on April 29, 2013, on the plea of cessation of central assistance and unwillingness of the staff to generate revenue to run it in a self-sustaining mode.

The Centre had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the state government in 1986 to provide financial requirement of SIET, Bhubaneswar, for five years. The state government was to manage SIET thereafter.

The Centre, however, continued to provide financial support to SIET till 2003. After the state government started providing funds for salary of the employees, the central assistance continued only for production of programmes till 2007.

While challenging the closure order, the petitioners alleged that the state government had never tried to use the services of SIET to generate its own funds but engaged private parties to execute various programmes. The central government stopped releasing further funds because the state government failed to provide the utilisation certificates despite repeated reminders.