Shimla, December 14
Is it possible to select a candidate for any post without preparing a merit list of candidates?
The answer is “yes”, if one goes by the information supplied by the Himachal Pradesh High Court under the Right to Information Act regarding direct recruitment of additional district and sessions judges in 2007.
An application was filed in this regard by RTI activist Dev Ashish Battacharya in which he had sought details of the marks obtained by the selected candidates and also the names and marks obtained by the first five candidates in the merit list in the preliminary, main and viva voce examinations.
As per information provided by the state public information officer of the high court, only one candidate was finally selected to the cadre of the district and additional district judge. The candidate was from the general category.
However, regarding the names and marks obtained by the first five candidates, he states that the organisation and administration branch of the high court has reported that “no such detail of first five candidates has been prepared”.
The selected candidate had obtained 163 marks out of 300 marks in the preliminary examination and his score in the paper of criminal laws was only 21 out of 100 marks. The detail regarding marks obtained in viva voce reads: “average marks out of aggregate of 300 marks X 9 = 207.22 or 207 marks”.
The high court had advertised two vacancies, one for ST candidates and the other for general category candidates. In all, 171 candidates, including nine ST candidates, appeared in the preliminary examination.
The selected candidate was placed at the 47th place in the list of candidates declared successful in the preliminary examination. The rules lay down that a maximum of 35 candidates can be called for the main examination against a post. It is not clear what criterion was
followed for calling candidates for the main examination and the interview.
A candidate, Pramod Goyal, who was not called for the interview, had moved the high court for the re-evaluation of his paper of constitutional law. The expert who re-evaluated the paper said in his report that the examiner had been stringent in marking his paper and that he had done as good as the candidates who had been selected for the interview. He should be awarded 100 marks instead of 94 like other selected candidates. While Goyal was called for the interview after re-evaluation, others whose papers were also subjected to such “stringent marking” got no such relief.
Bhattacharya points out that the case of Goyal makes it clear that the criteria for calling candidates for the main examination and for the interview were different. A candidate securing 21 marks out of 100 in a paper in the preliminary examination was called for the main examination (and he eventually got selected), but Goyal, who obtained 94 marks out of 200 in a paper in the main examination in the first evaluation, was not called for the interview.
The best course, Bhattacharya says, to avoid such controversies is that institutions like the high court and the Vidhan Sabha, which have to oversee the functioning of the entire administrative system, should not get involved in the business of recruitments and, like other departments, leave it to the state public service commission and the subordinate services board.
