Public employment: HC says inadvertent omissions should not crush career prospects
The Punjab and Haryana High Court has held that minor, inadvertent omissions by candidates should not jeopardise their chances of securing public employment, especially in the absence of any malpractice in the selection process. The court noted that public sector jobs were a significant aspiration for many and that such opportunities were rare. It held that stringent measures should be applied only when there was substantial reason to suspect misconduct and not when the omission had no bearing on the integrity or fairness of the selection process.
Justice Vinod S Bhardwaj also held that an inadvertent omission by a candidate in filling up certain details in the Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheet would not automatically culminate into the candidature rejected.
“Rejecting a candidature of a person is the extreme consequence of an omission and while being a guardian of fairness of the selection process, the court is also expected to balance the aspirations of the competing candidates considering that public employment is a scarce opportunity which is available occasionally,” the court asserted.
Justice Bhardwaj made it clear that a candidate in the high-pressure environment of competitive exams might at times commit an inadvertent oversight — an act or omission that was entirely innocuous. “In such a stage of anxiety laden competing pressure, a candidate may, at one point, commit an oversight, an act/omission that is innocuous and having no meaningful impact, but the consequence of that failure should not haunt a person for the rest of his life,” the court asserted.
The matter pertained to candidates’ failure to fill the booklet series bubbles on the OMR sheet in a recruitment examination conducted by the Haryana Public Service Commission (HPSC). Justice Bhardwaj asserted that the failure did not affect the integrity of the selection procedure, nor did it raise concerns of manipulation or tampering.
The court asserted that the word “liable” in the examination instructions implied a “possibility or probability” of rejection, rather than a “mandatory” outcome. The term “liable” did not denote an automatic rejection, but provided discretion to the examining authority. Citing Black’s Law Dictionary, the court explained rejection was a ‘likely consequence’ and it might not be a compulsory/mandatory consequence.
“The crucial aspect to be borne in mind by a public authority is as to whether the error has the potential of compromising the sanctity of the process of selection or eroding public faith in the process of selection,” the court added.
Justice Bhardwaj also took note of the HPSC’s counsel fair stand that failure to fill up the bubbles for identifying the booklet series did not prejudice the final outcome. “A trivial omission is required to be resorted to its extreme only in befitting circumstances, where the omission would have a semblance of vitiating the selection process or creating reasonable doubts and apprehensions in the minds of the general public that the final outcome of the selection process is likely to be severely compromised. None of the said circumstances, however, are alleged to exist in the present case,” the court added.
