Instead, they were told they were too old.
The twist, according to the Punjab and Haryana High Court, is that the Commission’s own rules exempted them from that very disqualification. But the reason it slipped through was a fee of Rs 150, or Rs 75 for women, that the candidates paid even though they didn’t have to.
Justice Harpreet Singh Brar disposed of three connected petitions—filed by Nirmala Devi, Somwati and Samsher Singh—with a common order announced in the court on 12 August and uploaded on the HC website on 1 September, ruling that none of them should have been shut out.
The High Court set aside the result and corrigendum dated 27 July 2024 to the extent that they excluded the three petitioners. It directed the Commission to consider their candidature afresh, in order of merit, subject to them meeting all other conditions.
The competent authority has two months from receipt of the order to act.
The petitioners will get consequential and notional benefits from the date their batchmates joined, though actual salary will only start from the date they themselves join.
A job that kept slipping away
The story goes back to 2016, when the Commission first advertised the TGT (Sanskrit) posts. That process was withdrawn. It tried again in 2019. That one was cancelled too, on 31 May 2019. The petitioners had applied both times.
When the Commission advertised the post a third time in 2023, it built in a safety net for candidates who had been let down twice already.
Clause 11 of the new advertisement said such candidates would get relaxation in age, exemption from the Haryana Teaching Eligibility Test requirement, and a waiver of the application fee, provided they reapplied and attached proof of their earlier payment.
The petitioners were even issued ‘Unique IDs’ by the Commission, flagging them as candidates from the cancelled advertisements.
Where it went wrong
The online portal, however, had no box to tick to claim the fee waiver. Unsure how the system would read a blank field, the petitioners did what many anxious job-seekers would do: they paid the fee anyway, just to be safe.
Their applications were accepted. They sat the exam on 30 April 2023. They cleared it, scoring higher than the last selected candidates in their categories.
Then came a notice on 28 July 2024. Their names were missing from the final result. The reason given: they were “overage”, the upper limit for the post was 42 years, and each of them had crossed it by the cut-off date.
When they went back to the Commission, they got a stranger answer still. Because they had paid the fee instead of claiming the waiver, the system had treated them as fresh applicants, not as returning candidates entitled to age relaxation.
The very act of paying meant to protect their applications from a technical glitch, had cost them their eligibility.
‘Metamorphosis of diligence into disqualification’
The Commission’s lawyer told the court that the portal wasn’t designed to link a candidate’s fee payment with their claim to relaxation. The two were processed independently, and paying the fee triggered a “fresh application” tag by default.
The Commission’s own affidavit went further. It said the Unique IDs had been issued only to candidates the Commission itself had already determined were eligible, based on their earlier, unsuccessful applications.
Justice Brar described the outcome as a “bizarre new edict”—that a fee, if waived, becomes disqualifying the moment a candidate pays it anyway.
The judge called the result “a rather cruel irony, not lost upon this Court”, noting that diligence had turned into disqualification.
‘Not the corridors of the Red Keep”
The Commission, the court said, had allotted the petitioners Unique IDs acknowledging their earlier attempts, accepted applications that would otherwise have failed the age criterion, taken their fee despite the exemption, and then relied on its own flawed system to reject them anyway.
Invoking Game of Thrones, the judge wrote that these are not the “corridors of the Red Keep” where one can proclaim “power is power” and act on “whims and fancies”.
The court said that public recruitment does not run on personal preferences but on the rule of law, and that a “mere technological oversight” could not be allowed to cost eligible candidates their claim.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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