By IANS,
New Delhi: The Delhi High Court Monday ruled that any form which is not properly filled by the candidate can be rejected outright.
The ruling came on a bunch of petitions by Union Public Services Commission (UPSC) which challenged the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) order to consider the applications of 11 candidates who had applied for the post of Assistant Public Prosecutor in Delhi but whose forms were rejected.
According to the UPSC, the applications were rejected as these were either without the required documents or the documents were in the wrong format.
A division bench of Justice Madan B.Lokur and Justice Mukta Gupta said the candidates should fulfil all requirements for the application form.
“The UPSC has rejected the candidature of 45 people due to non-submission of the required documents and/or submission of documents in the wrong format. If any relief is granted to the respondents before us, surely it would be appropriate to grant a similar relief to other similarly placed candidates, some of whom may not have approached the tribunal for relief,” the court said.
“If this exercise were to be undertaken, perhaps the entire examination would require to be cancelled. In our opinion, this is neither in the interest of the candidates who have qualified nor is it in the public interest to cancel the entire examination for the sake of accommodating a few,” the court said, setting aside the CAT’s order.
The UPSC issued an advertisement in 2008 for recruitment to 38 posts of assistant public prosecutors in Delhi’s prosecution department, with an LLB degree as the minimum requirement.
The respondents, in the case, failed to produce their degrees to the UPSC and said the degree was not issued to them.
The court observed it was difficult to believe that the LLB degree certificate was not issued to them for several years, as all of them met the requirement for three years experience at the bar.
“That apart, we find that soon after the rejection of their candidature on Dec 30, 2008, these respondents managed to produce their LLB degree certificates within a few days,” the court said.
“It is well known that the UPSC receives lakhs of applications for the central civil services examination. If every such applicant submits an incomplete application, that is to say that the relevant information is not submitted along with the application, the processing time for the UPSC would take several months and would, in the long run, be completely counterproductive,” the