HC turns down ‘human error’ plea

PRAYAGRAJ: The Allahabad high court has declined to give an opportunity to rectify incorrect entries made by 61 applicants in their online application forms of the Assistant Teacher Recruitment Examination 2019.

Justice Prakash Padia dismissed the petition filed by Ashutosh Kumar Srivastava and 60 others.

The petitioners’ contention was that they qualified for the assistant recruitment teacher exam, but they made certain errors while filling in the application form for appointment to primary schools of different districts in the state. They said these errors pertained to their BEd marks. The mistakes were not deliberate, but only a human error, they said, adding that in many cases the computer operator filled in wrong information.

The court rejected the plea and observed, “Error committed by the candidates cannot be said to be human in nature. The petitioners should have read the instructions that were issued time and again and should have correctly filled the entries relating to the marks obtained by them in their previous examinations. The contention that this was an error committed by the computer operator cannot simply be accepted.”

“If the courts were to accept such a plea of the petitioners, then this would result in a situation where the petitioners would get the benefit of a wrong if the wrong claim went unnoticed and if noticed, the petitioners could always turn around and claim that this was the result of a human error,” the court observed while dismissing the petition. The court was of the opinion that the aforesaid mistakes were not ‘a kind of human error’ but ‘deliberately and willfully’ mistakes were committed by the petitioners while filling in their application forms.

Earlier, on Wednesday, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court stayed the appointment process of 69,000 assistant basic teachers in the state as errors were cited in the answer key used in the assistant teacher recruitment examination.

Justice Alok Mathur passed the order on a writ petition filed by Amita Tripathi and others. The court’s order stopped the counselling process, which was scheduled to start from Wednesday. The court fixed July 12 as the next date of hearing.