Gurugram: The Supreme Court has granted a Scheduled Caste aspirant from Haryana a second chance at becoming a civil judge, directing the Punjab and Haryana High Court to consider relaxing the 45 percent minimum marks requirement for reserved category candidates in the state’s Civil Services (Judicial Branch) Examination, 2023–24.
Chief Justice Surya Kant-led three-judge bench, which heard the matter on 20 March, disposed of Diksha Kalson’s Special Leave Petition while granting her liberty to make a representation before the High Court on its administrative side.
The intervention by the bench, also comprising Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M. Pancholi, comes months after the Punjab and Haryana High Court had firmly shut the door on Kalson’s plea.
In January 2026, the high court dismissed her review application, reaffirming its February 2025 ruling that declined to disturb Clause 33 of the recruitment advertisement, which explicitly barred re-evaluation of answer sheets.
Kalson’s case had drawn attention for the unusual nature of her grievance.
After failing to make the cut by a whisker, 1.9 marks short of the 495-mark threshold for SC candidates, she obtained her answer sheets through RTI and found she had been awarded zero for a sentence-completion question on the word “eloquent”.
Her answer, “Public Officers become so eloquent and poised after going through the training process,” she argued, was grammatically sound.
The examiner did not agree. The HC did not find it fit to intervene.
But it was a different arithmetic that moved the Supreme Court.
Of 39 vacancies reserved for Scheduled Caste candidates, only nine SC candidates figured in the final selection list, a fact flagged before the bench by Senior Advocate Sanjay R. Hegde, who appeared for Kalson.
The court noted this and requested the high court to consider the representation “sympathetically, regardless of the view taken on the judicial side in the impugned judgments”.
Advocate Kumar Abhishek, who drafted the petition and briefed Hegde for arguments, told ThePrint, “We filed an appeal before the Supreme Court, which has requested the high court on the administrative side to consider relaxing the essential criteria of a minimum 45 percent for the petitioner.”
Explaining the significance of the Supreme Court order, Abhishek said that the Selection Committee of the High Court, comprising the chief justice and other senior high court judges, has the power to relax the essential conditions. One of the grounds is the failure to find a sufficient number of candidates in a specific category.
“The high courts are not subordinate to the Supreme Court and are independent on the administrative side. The Supreme Court ordinarily doesn’t pass a direction against them. The representation to be made by the petitioner would have to be considered in light of the request made by the bench headed by the Chief Justice of India,” he added.
Abhishek explained that the Supreme Court’s direction, while not a binding order, carries significant moral weight and places the ball squarely in the high court’s administrative side, which operates separately from its judicial wing.
For Kalson, a Scheduled Caste candidate who missed becoming a civil judge by 1.9 marks and a single contested sentence, the wait continues.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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