The court emphasized the need for professionalism and transparency in the recruitment process by the Central Railway.

JUDGMENT :

Dipankar Datta, J.

1. This is a batch of writ petitions, at the instance of 339 petitioners. These petitioners assail a common judgment and order of the Central Administrative Tribunal, Mumbai Bench, Mumbai (hereafter “the Tribunal” for short) dated 10th February, 2017 dismissing several original applications on its file. We propose to dispose of such writ petitions by this common judgment and order.

2. The original applications were instituted by 407 aspirants for public employment. They had participated in the selection process conducted by the Central Railway for appointment on Group ‘D’ posts, which followed an advertisement dated 2nd July, 2007. Allegedly, they were denied appointment despite being successful in the ‘Physical Examination Test’ (hereafter “PET” for short), written examination and medical test. The Tribunal, however, did not find any merit in the contentions raised by the original applicants and spurned the challenge by the impugned judgment and order.

3. The question that we are tasked to decide is whether the Central Railway illegally denied appointment to the petitioners, and also as to whether the Tribunal was justified in dismissing the original application.

4. The dispute lies in a narrow compass. The common claim of the original applicants before the Tribunal was that the Central Railway deviated from policy circulars issued by the Railway Board [Circular No. RBE No.121 dated 18th July, 2005, since modified by Circular No. RBE No.37 of 2007 dated 12th March, 2007] governing recruitment on Group ‘D’ posts. The selection process, they contended, stood vitiated because (i) successful candidates like the original applicants were denied appointment amounting to illegality and arbitrariness; (ii) no merit list of successful candidates was published leaving clear room to suspect nepotism and favouritism; (iii) 6 (six) + 1 (one), that is 7 (seven) panels in all were declared not according to merit but on the basis of roll numbers of the empaneled candidates, contrary to the aforesaid circulars which required publication of list on the basis of merit; (iv) appointments were offered without respecting the relative merits of the candidates; (v) rules of the game were altered after commencement of the game by introducing cut-off marks which were not mentioned in the employment notice; and (vi) recourse having been taken by the Central Railway to an unfair and non-transparent procedure resulting in appointment of undeserving candidates, the same resulted in exclusion of the original applicants from the zone of consideration for appointment.

5. The Central Railway defended its action of not offering appointment to the original applicants by filing reply affidavits and additional affidavits. Although it was not disputed before the Tribunal that the original applicants were successful in clearing the qualifying examinations but the Central Railway claimed that they could not be appointed because, based on the result of the written examination, they were found to have secured less marks than the last appointed candidate in the open, SC, ST and OBC categories. The further claim was that in the midst of the selection process it had been felt appropriate to call 20% candidates, over and above the number of vacancies, at the time of document verification to meet any shortfall, should any successful empanelled candidate be disinclined to accept the offer of appointment; and that the original applicants were called upon to appear for document verification only because they formed part of this group of 20% excess candidates. It was also claimed that the 6412 advertised vacancies having been filled up by appointing 6171 candidates, what remained were 241 vacancies. Of them, 209 vacancies for ST candidates could not be filled up for want of adequate number of such candidates and 32 cases were pending for verification. While contending that there was no illegality or lack of transparency in the selection process, the Cent