Sunil & Ors. vs. High Court of Delhi & Ors.
Background
The Delhi High Court recruited private secretaries in 2016-17. After the results were declared, some candidates sought re-evaluation of their answer sheets, and a Special Committee eventually re-evaluated the papers of 13 candidates, whose marks increased, including some already-appointed candidates and some newly-qualified ones. The Acting Chief Justice initially decided newly-qualified candidates would be appointed but placed at the bottom of the seniority list; later, in 2018, the Special Committee reversed course and granted them "notional seniority" based on their revised marks, effective from the original 2017 merit-list date. Other candidates who were not part of the re-evaluation, and whose relative rank dropped as a result, challenged this before the Delhi High Court, which set aside the revised seniority and restored the original bottom-of-list placement for the newly-qualified candidates.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that once the re-evaluation of the 13 candidates had become final and their marks had genuinely increased, it would defeat the purpose of allowing re-evaluation at all if those candidates were denied seniority commensurate with their corrected marks. The other candidates had known about the re-evaluation exercise at the time but chose not to seek re-evaluation themselves or challenge that process, so they could not later complain about its consequences. The Court found the Special Committee's 2018 decision to grant notional seniority from the original merit-list date was justified and restored it, holding the High Court had erred in overturning that decision.
Lesson Learnt
In competitive recruitment, correcting an evaluation error should ordinarily also correct its downstream consequences (such as seniority), otherwise the correction becomes meaningless; and a person who stays silent during a review process they knew was happening generally cannot later object to its outcome.