JOIN USSC stays HC order on revising KPSC selection list
The Supreme Court on Wednesday stayed a Karnataka High Court order “unsettling” the appointment of administrative officers pertaining to 1998, 1999 and 2004 batches made by the Karnataka Public Service Commission (KPSC) in 2006.
A bench of Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justice D Y Chandrachud allowed the plea made by some of the 393 officers, working in the state administration for 10 years.
Though senior advocate Kapil Sibal, appearing for some of the candidates selected in the revised list prepared by the KPSC, submitted that it was done on the basis of a CID report showing large-scale bunglings in the recruitment process, the bench questioned what these candidates were doing all these years and why they did not question the selection at the initial stage.
Senior advocates P P Rao, K V Vishwanathan, Guru Krishna Kumar and others, representing the selected candidates, contended the high court by its order on June 21, 2016 had directed for revising the list “merely on surmise”.
“The settled appointments have now been unsettled. The officers, who are working for 10 years, have now been put in limbo,” they submitted.
The high court erred in directing the fresh process of preparation of select list of candidates of the reserved category from the stage of written examination for the appointment, which is already made in the year 2006, they pleaded. The high court has upheld the webhosting of the list of November 11, 2014, based on a fact-finding committee report. This report itself is not valid in the eye of law, they claimed.
The petition filed by selected candidates, who now do not find themselves in the successful candidates list, through advocates Nishanth Patil and K L Ramesh contended that the KPSC has not brought on record as to how the entire exercise of re-moderation and scaling of 9,556 candidates of six subjects had been completed in a span of 20 days. Besides, the KPSC has not furnished the details with regard to the composition of any technical people who have undertaken the exercise of re-moderation and scaling before publishing the revised list.
The selected candidates claimed that they faced demotion after having worked as Group ‘A’ officers. As many as 28 candidates of the 1998 batch were out of the select list approved by the high court.
The apex court, while staying the high court order, directed the KPSC and the state government to file their response to the batch of petitions within four weeks and also sought response from the candidates who filed the writ petition before the high court.
The bench directed Karnataka government to publish the notice regarding the court's order for effective service to all parties to the list (dispute) in DH and Prajavani within six weeks. The court put the matter for further consideration in March 2017.