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In Re: Recruitment of Visually Impaired in Judicial Services v. The Registrar General, The High Court of Madhya Pradesh

Civil Appeal · 2025 INSC 300Decided 3 Mar 2025
SMW(C) No.-000002 - 2024 (with Suo Motu W.P.(C) No. 6 of 2024, C.A. Nos. 3496 & 3497 of 2025, and W.P.(C) Nos. 484 & 494 of 2024)
Justice J.B. Pardiwala · Justice R. Mahadevan

Background

This batch of cases arose after the Madhya Pradesh High Court amended Rule 6A of the Madhya Pradesh Judicial Service Rules, 1994 to exclude visually impaired and low-vision candidates from appointment to judicial service, and separately imposed an additional Rule 7 requirement (three years of practice, or a 70% score in the first attempt) that disproportionately burdened persons with disabilities. The Supreme Court took up the matter suo motu after a letter petition from a visually impaired law student and a mother of a visually impaired judicial aspirant, and clubbed it with connected appeals from Madhya Pradesh candidates (Ayush Yardi, Alok Singh) denied consideration, and writ petitions from Rajasthan judicial service aspirants who said a separate cut-off for persons with disabilities was not properly applied in preliminary exams. The High Court had justified the exclusion partly by relying on an opinion from a Dean of a medical college framed, the petitioners argued, to elicit a predetermined negative answer.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that visually impaired candidates cannot be treated as "not suitable" for judicial service and are eligible to compete for such posts, relying on the "reasonable accommodation" principle established in its earlier ruling in Vikash Kumar v. UPSC, which had overruled the older, more restrictive view in V. Surendra Mohan v. State of Tamil Nadu. The Court reasoned that judicial functions long assumed to require unimpaired sight (dictating orders, reviewing files) are already performed with the assistance of court staff, stenographers and law clerks for able-bodied judges too, and that technology and human support can equally enable visually impaired judges, citing real examples of successful judges and judicial officers with visual disabilities in India and abroad. It struck down Rule 6A insofar as it excluded visually impaired and low-vision candidates, and struck down the proviso to Rule 7 insofar as it imposed the extra practice/first-attempt requirement on persons with disabilities (while keeping the underlying educational qualification and minimum aggregate score, subject to relaxation). The Court directed a separate cut-off and merit list for persons with disabilities, held there should be no distinction between "Persons with Disabilities" and "Persons with Benchmark Disabilities" for these purposes, and directed that the affected candidates and Rajasthan petitioners be given fresh consideration, with the recruitment process to be completed within three months.

Lesson Learnt

Excluding persons with disabilities from a profession based on assumptions about what their bodies cannot do (rather than examining what reasonable accommodations (technology, support staff, procedural adjustments) would let them do) violates the constitutional guarantee of equality; the burden is on institutions to accommodate, not on disabled candidates to prove they don't need it.

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

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