The Hyderabad High Court has served notices to IT firm Tech Mahindra and the Telangana government after four of the companys former employees claimed they were fired illegally, PTI reported on Wednesday. The court asked Tech Mahindra to explain why they cannot re-hire the employees, who were sacked as part of a cost-cutting exercise.

The employees’ petition said that they had approached the labour commissioner, but he did not take their case seriously. They also claimed they were finding it hard to make ends meet.

The judge asked the principal secretary of Telangana’s Labour and Employment Department to explain why it did not verify if the action was legal or not. Tech Mahindra and the state government have three weeks to respond to the notices.

On Friday, the senior leadership of the Mahindra Group had publicly apologised for the manner in which an employee at Tech Mahindra was asked to resign by a human resource executive after a recording of the interaction went gone viral on social media. “I want to add my personal apology,” the company’s chairperson, Anand Mahindra, said on Twitter. “Our core value is to preserve the dignity of the individual and we will ensure this does not happen in future.”