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Pradeep Singh Dehal v. State of Himachal Pradesh & Ors.

Civil Appeal · 2019 INSC 1045Decided 17 Sept 2019
Civil Appeal Nos. 7211-7212 of 2019
Justice L. Nageswara Rao · Justice Hemant Gupta

Background

A university advertised posts of Assistant Professor at Himachal Pradesh University. After a failed earlier round of recruitment, a fresh advertisement allowed candidates who had applied earlier to be considered without reapplying. The appellant was selected for an OBC-category post, but a rival candidate (the writ petitioner) challenged the selection in the High Court, claiming he had wrongly been denied 5 marks for "publications" that he had been given in an earlier, related selection process. The High Court agreed and ordered the university to add those marks to his score, which the appellant then challenged in the Supreme Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that while courts should generally not sit in judgment over academic experts' assessment of marks, the record showed the same Selection Committee had inconsistently given the rival candidate "publication" marks for one post on one day but denied them for another post the very next day, making the process unfair. The Court also flagged that the University's practice of holding separate interviews for general and reserved-category candidates for the same post was itself illegal, since a reserved-category candidate who tops the merit list should be treated as a general-category selectee. It ordered the University to constitute a fresh Expert Committee to re-evaluate publications for all candidates from the relevant advertisement and prepare one joint merit list, while protecting candidates already appointed (other than the appellant, whose fate would depend on the fresh exercise).

Lesson Learnt

Courts will not usually re-grade academic evaluations, but inconsistent treatment of identical candidates by the same selection panel can be struck down as unfair; and recruitment processes that run separate interviews for "general" and "reserved" category candidates for the same post are legally flawed, since merit-worthy reserved candidates must be counted against general seats.

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

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