The High Court has directed the Haryana Government to put in place a uniform recruitment policy to ensure that eligible candidates on the prescribed cut-off date are not excluded from public employment because of curable defects in online application forms or uploaded documents.
The court also prescribed safeguards for future recruitments conducted by the state, including a sufficiently long correction window after the closing date, verification of certificates through official databases wherever the prescribed details are furnished, and a minimum of seven days for candidates to respond to provisional rejection notices.
“The Chief Secretary to the Government of Haryana shall frame a policy, within a period of three months, binding upon HPSC and HSSC in all future recruitments,” Justice Harpreet Singh Brar directed.
The Bench also ruled that candidates possessing the requisite eligibility on the prescribed cut-off date could not be excluded from public employment because of defects in uploading supporting documents or filling out online application forms, provided the eligibility claim was made in the application and the defect was curable.
Such protection, however, will not extend to cases involving fraud or misrepresentation, or where a candidate failed to avail himself or herself of an effective opportunity to rectify the defect or did not approach the authorities promptly.
Deciding 145 writ petitions together, Justice Brar drew a clear distinction between possessing eligibility and producing documentary proof of it.
The prescribed eligibility was required to exist on the cut-off date and could not be relaxed, bu
The scrutiny of documents is intended to verify whether a candidate who has proved his merit in the examination does in fact possess the eligibility which he has claimed, and it is neither meant to be a digital competence assessment which tests the skill of a candidate in uploading documents on a portal, nor a sieve designed to reduce the number of claimants to a post,” Justice Brar observed.
The ruling by Justice Brar came in recruitment disputes involving the Haryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC) and the Haryana Public Service Commission (HPSC).
In the lead case, a candidate for the post of primary teacher in the Mewat cadre entered the particulars of his BC-B certificate correctly but uploaded an earlier certificate due to an error by a cyber cafe operator.
t a defect in documentary proof did not, by itself, extinguish a candidate’s candidature.
