4,850 clerk posts: High court raps HSSC over recruitment process

CHANDIGARH: The Punjab and Haryana high court has come down heavily on the Haryana Staff Selection Commission (HSSC) for mismanagement in exam conducted for 4,850 posts of clerks in Haryana in 2019.

“This court highly deprecates the apathetic and indifferent approach adopted by the commission. The commission is censured to be careful in future,” the bench of justice Arun Monga observed, giving last chance to the commission.

On April 25, the high court had asked the HSSC to revaluate the answer keys, in which mistakes had taken place and had asked the commission to prepare the result afresh. The result was declared in September 2020 and subsequently appointments of 4,850 clerks were made in different departments. The posts were advertised in June 2019, result of the written exam was declared in December 2019, and in January 2020, document verification took place. Selection of candidates took place in September 2020.

It had come before the court that for the same question while some were awarded marks and declared selected, others were denied marks and they remained unsuccessful. Before high court, the commission had admitted to the mistake but blamed software failure for the same.

“The scapegoat is thus a software malfunction and not the commission, is the argument. As if the commission is not responsible for the revised answer key and/or the software it got prepared for the examination. Same old nonchalant, shrug it off most casually and lackadaisical approach,” the bench observed, adding that it seemed to have become a habit of the commission to commit such mistakes.

“Each time they come up with some moonshine defense, one illustration is herein itself, that due to the malfunction of the software, mistake happened on its own and personnel of commission are not responsible,” the bench said, adding that on the contrary, it is no rocket science to observe that apparently preparation of a wrong answer key has nothing to do with the software. “It is a clear mistake on the part of the examiner who prepared the answer key. The job of identifying the human resource, including examiner or chief examiner, is with the commission,” it added.

The bench further said the commission ought to take the entire responsibility and must be more careful rather than shifting of burden from one shoulder to the other. The court cautioned that such a mistake should not happen in future.