Tamil Nadu - Chennai   

Merit lists of civil services exam quashed

CHENNAI: Declaring Rule 16 (2) of the Examination Rules for Civil Services Examination 2005 “unconstitutional, null and void,” the Madras High Court has quashed the merit lists prepared by the Centre and the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC).

A Division Bench, comprising Justices Elipe Dharma Rao and S.R. Singharavelu, said instead of being affirmative, progressive and pragmatic in achieving social justice, the impugned rule ran counter to the benefit of SC/ST/OBC candidates.

The Bench directed the Centre and the UPSC to proceed with the selection from the stage of announcement of results for all the 457 posts in 21 services notified in December 2004, re-work the allocation dehors the impugned rule and treat the reserved candidates, who got selected on merit without availing themselves of relaxed standards, as unreserved candidates.

They should fill the posts of ‘reserved category’ with the candidates who availed themselves of the relaxed standards after preparing the merit list for each category by following the Supreme Court’s judgments in the R.K. Sabharwal’s case and Satya Prakash’s case.

Considering the fact that there was a considerable delay in making the selection, the court directed the official respondents to complete the entire exercise within 12 weeks.

The UPSC had issued a notification in December 2004 to fill 457 posts in 21 different cadres. It published a list of 425 candidates who were successful in the main examination in the first phase and remaining 32 in the second phase along with a consolidated reserve list of 64 candidates. Thirty-one OBC candidates and one SC candidate, whose names were in the merit list, did not choose to get the posting as per the unreserved category. They chose to avail themselves of the higher services under the reserved quota.

Two selected candidates, R. Arulanandan and Ramesh Ram, filed petitions before the Central Administrative Tribunal seeking to declare Rule 16 (2) as unconstitutional and a direction to the respondents to make allocation to various services on the basis of the civil services examinations 2005 by treating the 31 OBC candidates, selected on merit, as general category candidates.

The tribunal disposed of the petitions with certain directions. Aggrieved, the writ petitions were filed.

In the common order, the Bench said the Supreme Court had held that a reserved category candidate getting selected on his own merit should be considered only as an unreserved candidate and not as a reserved category candidate. However, subsequent to the judgment, the impugned amended rule came into effect.

By resorting to Rule 16 (2), the official respondents had deprived 31 OBCs and one SC candidate from getting their postings. It was seen that such vacancies created by the meritorious reserved candidates were then filled with other unreserved candidates.

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