The Madras High Court on Thursday decided to examine in detail a case filed by a Group I service aspirant, alleging arbitrariness and a lack of transparency in the three-stage selection process being conducted by the Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC), involving a preliminary examination followed by a main examination and a viva voce.
Justice V. Parthiban told counsel for TNPSC that he had decided to deal with the matter seriously since the petitioner, S. Vignesh, of Chennai, appeared to be a meritorious candidate and had made out a prima facie case of discrepancies in the questions asked in the preliminary examination held on March 3 and the answer key released on March 4.
Stating that he had gone through the question paper, the judge noted that there were some questions, which would not have a definitive answer. “One question is ‘what is judicial activism?’ How do you expect the candidates to answer this?” the judge asked the counsel and granted him time till Monday to file a detailed counter-affidavit on behalf of TNPSC.
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When it was brought to the notice of the judge that the key answers with respect to as many as 24 questions were not correct, he said awarding marks to all the candidates who attempted those questions would make a sea of a difference in the selection process. “It will completely unsettle your provisional selection list,” he told TNPSC.
In his affidavit, the petitioner stated that he was a B.Tech graduate from Sastra University and a master’s degree-holder in Human Resource Management from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. He was now drawing a salary of ₹38 lakh per annum at a multinational company, but had decided to take the Group I exam to render public service.
The preliminary exam contained 200 multiple-choice questions carrying 1.5 marks each. He had scored 175.5 out of 300. However, on going through the answer key, he found that it contained incorrect answers for at least 10 questions. Similarly, other candidates had pointed to wrong answers for seven more questions.
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If marks were awarded to him for those 17 questions, his total score will increase to 195, the petitioner said, and claimed that the TNPSC had refused to respond to requests made by candidates who had challenged the contents of the answer key along with supporting materials to prove that they contained incorrect answers.
“Hence, non-publication of the revised key answers and consequent publication of the marks of the candidates and the cut-off marks for the selection is arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable, violating Article 14 (right to equality before the law and equal protection of the laws) of the Constitution,” he contended.