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Goa Public Service Commission vs. Pankaj Rane

Civil Appeal · 2022 INSC 399Decided 6 Apr 2022
Civil Appeal No. 2779 of 2022
K.M. Joseph · Hrishikesh Roy

Background

The Goa Public Service Commission advertised posts of Junior Scale Officer; after a screening test and written examination narrowed nearly 1,866 applicants down to just four, the Commission, about a week before the interview, decided on its own to introduce a minimum qualifying mark (26 out of 40, i.e. 65%) for the interview itself, a requirement that appeared nowhere in the governing Rules or the advertisement. Three of the four candidates (the respondents) failed to clear this newly-introduced interview cut-off and their names were withheld from the government, prompting them to challenge the Commission's decision in the Bombay High Court (Goa Bench), which ruled in their favour.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that under the applicable Goa Civil Service Rules, 2016, the Rules explicitly fixed a minimum passing mark only for the written examination, and required the Commission to prepare the merit list purely on the aggregate of written and interview marks, with no provision empowering the Commission to additionally impose a separate minimum for the interview alone. Relying on its earlier decisions in P.K. Ramachandra Iyer and Durgacharan Misra, the Court held that a recruiting body cannot unilaterally add such a qualifying criterion where the rules do not provide for one, since doing so effectively amends the rules and can unfairly eliminate otherwise meritorious candidates from the final list. The Court distinguished this from cases where a benchmark was validly fixed by the employer itself (not a rule-bound statutory Commission) or was permitted under the specific rules in question, and accordingly dismissed the Commission's appeal, directing it to prepare and forward the select list per the original Rules within four weeks.

Lesson Learnt

A statutory recruiting body cannot invent additional eligibility hurdles (like a fresh interview cut-off) midway through a selection process if the governing rules and the original advertisement did not provide for one, doing so unlawfully changes the "rules of the game" after candidates have already competed under the known terms.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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