In a relief to candidates who were provisionally selected to the posts of lecturers in state-run polytechnics in Tamil Nadu, the Madras High Court Thursday directed the Teachers Recruitment Board (TRB) to proceed with the selection process.
The court also directed the board to reject the candidature of 196 aspirants who are accused of tampering answer sheets.
The issue of alleged tampering of answer-sheets brought whole selection process to a grinding halt.
A Division Bench, comprising justices K K Sasidharan and P D Audikesavalu, confirmed the order of a single judge at the high court's Madurai Bench and directed the TRB to complete the selection exercise by April 30.
The TRB had invited applications for 1,058 vacant posts of lecturers in various disciplines in polytechnics in the 2017-18 academic year. The written exam was held on September 16, 2017, for which 1.33 lakh candidates had appeared.
When the board was verifying certificates, after holding the written exam, complaints were made alleging malpractice in respect of scanned copies of the Optical Mark Reader/Recognition (OMR) sheets entrusted for evaluation to an external agency based in Noida.
The TRB immediately cancelled the entire selection process and the notification rescinding the selection was challenged before the Madurai Bench by a batch of petitioners who were provisionally selected.
The single judge at Madurai allowed the petitions, opining that after cancelling the candidature of the 196 tainted candidates, it would be possible for the board to proceed further.
Another single judge at the principal seat, however, dismissed a batch of writ petitions on the ground that the sanctity of the selection process should be maintained by all concerned.
When the appeals came up, the division bench said the core question before it was whether the TRB was correct in cancelling the whole selection process.
The police officer who probed the case submitted before it that more marks were awarded to 196 candidates by using the scanned images of OMR sheets, the bench said.
Originals of all the 1,33,568 OMR sheets, however, remained in the safe custody of the board.
The officer, an additional deputy commissioner of police, stated that the tampering was established after verifying the 196 scanned images seized from the external agency with corresponding original OMR sheets with the board.
Citing various Supreme Court judgments, the high court bench in its order said that "in the subject case, there is absolutely no difficulty to reject the candidature of the tainted candidates."
The board did not consider possibility of segregation of tainted candidates from others and cancelled the very selection, it said.
Such a measure was to the detriment of those who were not in any way responsible for tampering with the scanned copies of the OMR sheets, the bench said.
"We are of the considered view that the learned single judge at the Madurai Bench was correct in the finding that the Board...
"...should have segregated the tainted candidates from non-tainted candidates and proceeded with the selection process," it said.
The court also set aside the order of the Single Judge at Principal seat at Madras.
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