The Madras High Court on Thursday held that the Teachers Recruitment Board (TRB) ought not to have cancelled the entire competitive examination conducted for the appointment of lecturers in various disciplines in government polytechnic colleges for the year 2017-18 just because answer sheets of 196 candidates were tampered with.
A Division Bench of Justices K.K. Sasidharan and P.D. Audikesavalu directed the Board to reject the candidature of those 196 persons and proceed with the selection process with respect to others.
The said exercise of selecting the eligible candidates and issuing appointment orders to them should be completed by April 30, they ordered.
They pointed out that the examinations had been cancelled on account of certain malpractices committed by an outsourcing agency entrusted with the work of evaluation.
The agency had allegedly used scanned images of 196 OMR sheets to tamper with the marks though the original OMR sheets were still in the safe custody of TRB.
Therefore, the candidates whose OMR sheets had been subjected to tampering could be segregated and the selection process with respect to the rest could be allowed to go on, the judges said.