Observing that those aspiring for public employment need to be above board, the High Court of Karnataka has rejected the pleas of two persons who were removed from the zone of eligible candidates by the Indian Railways after an enquiry found their alleged involvement in the malpractices during the recruitment process.
“It hardly needs to be stated that in public recruitments, persons participating in the process with unclean hands cannot be favoured, especially when untainted lot is available in the open market,” the court observed.
A Division Bench, comprising Justice Krishna S. Dixit and Justice P. Krishna Bhat, made these observations while dismissing petitions filed by Rajesh G. and Prakash V.G, both hailing from Hubballi.
The petitioners questioned the 2019 order passed by the Central Administrative Tribunal, which had refused to interfere with the decision of the Railway Recruitment Cell not to consider them to the selection even though they were found qualified and passed even in the medical examination for the posts of Group-D prior to the outcome of an enquiry.
The Railways, in 2015, wrote to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to conduct an enquiry following allegations of rampant malpractices during the recruitment process, commenced in 2013.
In the enquiry report, the CBI had said that petitioners were guilty of allegation of malpractices as they were among the recipients of answers of written examination through SMSs from the main conspirators of malpractices.
Following this, the petitioners were discontinued from the recruitment process.
The petitioners had questioned the legality of the enquiry while contending that such an enquiry on recruitment process could not have entrusted to the CBI as per the rules governing recruitment process.
However, the Bench observed that “the employing agencies cannot be faltered when they cause some reasonable enquiry when shady deals do occur in the recruitment process, malpractice in the examination being one of them.”
The Bench declined to interfere with the tribunal’s order while observing that “where some reasonable enquiry is made by an expert agency like CBI and it reveals malpractice a prima facie attributable to some of the candidates, it is not desirable that they should be inducted into public service.”
