Over a hundred applicants for Instructor posts at Uttar Pradesh's Industrial Training Institutes were shut out through a qualifying cut-off that appears nowhere in the actual recruitment rules - a rule that only allowed the selection committee to trim an oversized applicant pool, not invent a minimum score. With thousands of sanctioned posts still vacant more than a decade later, the Supreme Court finds the exclusion arbitrary and orders fresh consideration for appointment, even after all these years.
"I applied for a position as an Instructor at a government Industrial Training Institute back in 2014, hoping to put my technical training and craft certification to use teaching the next generation of skilled workers. I never even got called for an interview. Years later, when we finally got the government to explain why, it turned out they had applied a 'cut-off' minimum score that isn't mentioned anywhere in the actual recruitment rules - a rule that only allows them to trim down an overcrowded applicant pool to four times the number of open positions, not to invent an arbitrary passing threshold. And here's what makes it worse: they advertised 2,498 positions, but couldn't even find 2,200 candidates who met their made-up cut-off. Thousands of teaching positions across the state have sat empty for over a decade while qualified people like me were turned away for failing a test that was never supposed to exist."
Moral Universe
The narrative frames the case as a straightforward story of bureaucratic overreach - a government agency inventing an extra hurdle that the actual rules never authorized, then using that invented hurdle to exclude qualified applicants, leaving essential public teaching positions unfilled for over a decade in the process.
Emotional Driver
Deep frustration at watching a decade of professional opportunity slip away due to a screening criterion that, upon careful examination, the government itself was never authorized to apply, compounded by the absurdity of vacancies remaining unfilled the whole time.
Objective
To finally be considered for appointment to the Instructor positions he originally applied for, now that the unauthorized cut-off has been exposed and struck down, notwithstanding the many years that have passed.
Blind Spots
The narrative's focus on the invented cut-off's unfairness does not directly engage with the genuinely separate, threshold procedural question the Court itself first had to resolve - whether applicants who participated in the selection process without objecting to the underlying eligibility rules at the time could later challenge that process at all, a question the Court answered against them on the general principle, before carving out the narrower path to relief based specifically on the unauthorized cut-off, not the broader rules themselves.
Inherent Tensions
- —The demand for full vindication sits against the Court's own preliminary finding that the appellants were, in fact, generally barred from challenging the 2014 Rules or the advertisements themselves, having applied without any contemporaneous objection - meaning their ultimate relief rests on a narrower, separate ground.
- —The claim of straightforward entitlement to appointment competes with the practical reality that over a decade has passed, appellants have aged, and the relief ultimately granted is a fresh opportunity for consideration - interview and appointment process - not an automatic, immediate grant of the jobs themselves.
- —The framing of total exclusion by an unfair system sits against the Court's more measured, dual finding: the cut-off marks issue was indeed arbitrary and unauthorized, but this specific finding doesn't extend to invalidating the broader 2014 Rules or the CITS-certificate-as-preferential-qualification policy the appellants had originally set out to challenge.