Hyderabad: The division bench of the High Court on Thursday directed the Telangana State-level Police Recruitment Board to commence within four weeks, the selection process to fill 15,644 police constable vacancies and finalise the selections expeditiously.
The bench, comprising Justice Abhinand Kumar Shavili and Justice N. Rajeshwar Rao, referred the dispute over ‘wrong questions’ which were sought to be deleted to an independent expert body afresh.
The court asked that the selection process be completed after taking the second opinion from the independent body of experts. This would bring a clarification in the minds of the unemployed youth and it will instil great confidence in the recruitment agency,” the bench said.
The court made the observations while adjudicating an appeal filed by the chairman of the recruitment board who challenged the orders of a single judge directing the recruitment board to exclude the marks given to questions nos 122, 130 and 144, which were not translated into Telugu, and also to exclude the mark for question no. 57, and re-evaluate the papers and publish the provisional selection list accordingly to proceed with the selection process.
The single judge had issued the order over a batch of petitions filed by unsuccessful candidates, who raised grievances that questions in the final examination were wrong and sought deletion of those questions.
Challenging the single judge orders, the recruitment board filed an appeal with the division bench.
On Thursday, standing counsel for the police recruitment board cited a Supreme Court judgment from 2021 that held it was not permissible for the High Courts to go into the issue of wrong questions and deletion of questions in recruitment, and to leave the same to an expert body.
The bench directed the recruitment board to refer the dispute of deletion of wrong questions in the question paper of the said examination to “second independent expert body” comprising academicians from Osmania University, which will go into the aspects of wrong questions, deletion of questions and issue of not printing questions in Telugu.
The court said that there must not be any overlap of members from the first panel of experts in the second independent body.
