PG in any specialised stream of Home Science eligible to apply for lecturer post: SC

New Delhi: The Supreme Court has set aside the Karnataka High Court's order, which quashed the appointment of 18 posts of lecturer in Home Science, on the ground that the notification did not specify specialisation of the subject.

A bench of Justices P S Narasimha and Aravind Kumar, in its judgement on Thursday, said Home Science in itself is a subject recognised by the UGC for under graduation, so a post graduation degree in any of its stream would make one eligible to apply for the post of lecturers.

"For under-graduation, Home Science in itself is the subject. In fact, UGC also considers Home Science as a subject, with subject code no 12, as per the latest information bulletin issued by it towards National Eligibility Test conducted in December, 2023. To teach undergraduates, the qualification prescribed is simply a post graduation degree in the subject of Home Science. We repeat, it does not matter in which subject of Home Science that the post-graduation is obtained," the bench said.

The bench said till date, the lecturers of Home Science in undergraduate programme run by the Government First Grade Colleges have been treated as one cadre and recruitment to the posts were advertised as such. 

However, "If one has to follow the logic adopted by the High Court, then the entire notification will collapse as the subjects of History, Economics, Political Science, Sociology etc are also mentioned without the so-called specialisations and they must be set aside by the same logic," the bench said.

The bench also gave example like History has its specialised subjects in post graduation such as Ancient History, Archaeology, Epigraphy, Modern Indian History, World History, European History, South-east Asian History, West Asian History etc. 

The simple answer is that for under graduation, History is a subject in itself, the court added.

Dealing with the plea by the appointed candidates, the bench upheld the recruitment process initiated in 2007 by the Karnataka Public Service Commission and affirmed the appointments.

The bench also said if the rule does not prescribe a subject-wise speciality, there is no justification for the High Court to examine the propriety, or for that matter its beneficial effect.

The bench, therefore, held, "We found no difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that the requirement, as assumed by the Karnataka Administrative Tribunal and the High Court, is not a mandate of the recruitment rules. Even otherwise, the Tribunal and the High Court have erroneously based their conclusions on policy considerations relating to how such a breakup would be beneficial to the candidates". 

The bench said the High Court committed an error in not focusing on what the rule provides for and whether the advertisement is in consonance with it. 

"If the High Court had confined itself to the basic features of judicial review, it would have avoided committing the error that it did," the bench said.