Rajasthan HC: 10% interview cap does not reach 2021 Assistant Professor recruitment; single judge set aside

Justice Inderjeet Singh and Justice Sandeep Taneja held that the May 2022 amendment to Rule 19 of the Collegiate Branch Rules cannot govern a recruitment advertised in November 2021, that Ajay Hasia does not control public employment, and that Dr Rachita Mathur concealed an earlier Jodhpur petition on the same point.

A division bench of the Rajasthan High Court at Jaipur has set aside a single judge’s January 2025 direction that the Rajasthan Public Service Commission conclude its 2021 recruitment of 337 Assistant Professors in medical colleges under a rule amended five months after the advertisement, which caps interview marks at 10 per cent. Justice Inderjeet Singh and Justice Sandeep Taneja, in a reportable judgment authored by Justice Taneja, held that a recruitment is governed by the rules in force on the date of the advertisement, that the amended Rule 19 of the Rajasthan Medical Service (Collegiate Branch) Rules, 1962 is a substantive change and not a procedural one, and that the 40 per cent weightage the Commission gave to the interview was a matter for the expert body, not the court. The bench also found that the writ petitioner, Dr Rachita Mathur, a candidate for three Skin and VD posts, had concealed an earlier petition on the same grievance filed at the Jodhpur principal seat and dismissed in July 2023, sat the screening test without protest, and came to court two and a half years late. Her writ petition was dismissed.

337 posts, a screening test, and a rule change in between

The RPSC advertised the posts on 27 November 2021 across 43 broad and super speciality subjects, with 22 December 2021 as the last date to apply. The advertisement said selection would be by interview, with a screening test if applications ran high. Dr Mathur applied for Skin and VD, where only three posts were on offer. The screening test for subjects with excess applications was held on 5 and 6 May 2022; hers was on 6 May, and the answer key came out on 10 June 2022.

In between, two decisions were taken. On 10 May 2022 the RPSC’s Full Commission fixed the weightage: for subjects without a screening test, 40 per cent for academics and 60 per cent for interview; for subjects with one, 40 per cent for the screening test, 20 for academics and 40 for interview. The Commission had taken the same 40:20:40 decision on 24 April 2019 for about 23 recruitments, including a January 2020 advertisement for the same post. Then on 23 May 2022 the Department of Personnel notified the Rajasthan Various Service (Second Amendment) Rules, 2022, amending the recruitment provisions in a schedule of service rules, among them Rule 19 of the 1962 Rules, to require a written examination followed by an interview carrying no more than 10 per cent of the total marks.

Dr Mathur’s route to the single judge was indirect. Reserved-category candidates had filed three petitions in 2022 over backlog vacancies in the same recruitment, and an interim order of 4 May 2022 had stopped the RPSC from declaring the result. On 14 May 2024 she sought impleadment in the lead petition, CWP 1777/2022, and was added on 20 May. Those petitions were disposed of by consent on 24 May 2024 with liberty to make representations. Four days later she applied to have that order modified so that the RPSC would be directed to follow the 23 May 2022 notification; the single judge obliged on 30 May 2024. The State and the Commission applied to vacate that order, and on 6 September 2024 the single judge instead gave her liberty to file a fresh petition. CWP 15018/2024 followed, asking that the selection process in the advertisement be struck down as unconstitutional and that the notification be applied.

On 10 January 2025 the single judge allowed it, directing the appellants to conclude the selection in line with the notification and amended Rule 19, to follow Ajay Hasia v. Khalid Mujib Sehravardi, (1981) 1 SCC 722, and Ashok Kumar Yadav v. State of Haryana, AIR 1987 SC 454, and to consider her candidature on merit. The State filed D.B. Special Appeal Writ No. 79/2025 and the RPSC No. 93/2025.

What the appellants and the doctor argued

Mr Vigyan Shah, Additional Advocate General, with Mr Sankalp Vijay for the State, and Mr Yuvraj Samant with Ms Neha Amola and Mr Tilak Vaid for the RPSC, argued that rules amended after an advertisement cannot apply to a selection already under way, and that the single judge was wrong to treat the amended Rule 19 as procedural and therefore retrospective. The Commission had discretion over how to allocate marks and had followed its 2019 decision. Dr Mathur had taken the screening test without protest and was estopped. The single judge’s finding that she had challenged the process before the screening test was wrong. And she had suppressed the fact that on 31 May 2023 she and others had filed CWP 8167/2023, Dr. Sukhdev Khadav v. State of Rajasthan, at Jodhpur, seeking an interview cap of 12.5 per cent in this very recruitment; the principal seat dismissed it on 10 July 2023 as premature, noting that the notification post-dated the advertisement. They relied on Lila Dhar v. State of Rajasthan, (1981) 4 SCC 159, N.T. Devin Katti v. Karnataka Public Service Commission, (1990) 3 SCC 157, Anzar Ahmad v. State of Bihar, (1994) 1 SCC 150, Rashmi Mishra v. M.P. Public Service Commission, (2006) 12 SCC 724, Assam Public Service Commission v. Pranjal Kumar Sarma, (2020) 20 SCC 680, and Tej Prakash Pathak v. High Court of Rajasthan, (2025) 2 SCC 1. Counsel for the private respondents and intervenors, led by Mr Kamlakar Sharma, Senior Advocate, took the same line and added Manish Kumar Shahi v. State of Bihar, (2010) 12 SCC 576, and Bhaskar Laxman Jadhav v. Karamveer Kakasaheb Wagh Education Society, (2013) 11 SCC 531.

Mr R.K. Mathur, Senior Advocate, with Mr Aditya Kiran Mathur and Mr Deependra Yadav for Dr Mathur, defended the judgment. Forty per cent for the interview was excessive on the settled law in Ajay Hasia and Ashok Kumar Yadav, and the allocation had not been disclosed in the advertisement. The notification flowed from a Cabinet decision of 10 May 2022 and the selection had not concluded when it issued, so it applied; the amended rule was procedural and therefore retrospective. On the concealment, he said his client had not known of the Jodhpur petition; a colleague might have obtained her signature on the vakalatnama.

A petition she says she did not know she had filed

The bench took the concealment first. The State had placed the Jodhpur filing on record by additional affidavit after learning of it during the appeals. Dr Mathur filed no counter-affidavit. Citing Dalip Singh v. State of U.P., (2010) 2 SCC 118, V. Chandrasekaran v. Administrative Officer, (2012) 12 SCC 133, and Bhaskar Laxman Jadhav, the judges restated that a litigant invoking Article 226 must disclose all material facts, that it is not for the litigant to decide which facts are material, and that one who suppresses facts is not entitled to relief, interim or final.

The explanation did not survive the absence of an affidavit. Without one, the bench could not accept that a colleague had got her signature without her knowledge; and for a highly educated person holding a master’s degree in medical science, it was difficult to see how that could have happened. The story was, the judges said, “nothing but an afterthought to cover up the non-disclosure”. She had not come with clean hands and was not entitled to any relief in the discretionary jurisdiction. The writ petition was liable to be dismissed on that ground alone. Because the single judge had allowed it, the bench went on to the merits anyway.

Prospective by its own terms, and not merely procedural

Unamended Rule 19 required the Commission to scrutinise applications and call as many qualified candidates as it thought desirable for interview, with its decision on eligibility final. The 2022 amendment rules, made under the proviso to Article 309, say in Rule 1(2) that they come into force on publication in the Gazette, which was 23 May 2022. Nothing gives them retrospective effect.

The bench then set out the settled position. In Assam Public Service Commission, the Supreme Court held, following State of Bihar v. Mithilesh Kumar, (2010) 13 SCC 467, and N.T. Devin Katti, that the norms existing when the selection process begins control it, and that a change in the norms does not affect an ongoing process unless the new rules are expressly retrospective; a procedure introduced in April 2019 could not apply to vacancies advertised in December 2018, particularly where the screening test had already been held under the old rules. Tej Prakash Pathak, answering a reference in 2025, held that a recruitment process begins with the advertisement and ends with the filling of vacancies, and that the eligibility criteria notified at the start cannot be changed midway unless the extant rules or the advertisement permit it, and even then only in a manner that meets Article 14.

Here the process began on 27 November 2021, when the old Rule 19 was in force; the amendment arrived midway. The amended rule therefore could not apply. The bench noted that the State itself had said as much at the time: the RPSC wrote on 21 July 2022 asking whether the notification applied to this recruitment, and the government replied on 28 July 2022 that the rules on the date of the advertisement governed.

The single judge had got around this by calling the amendment procedural. The bench disagreed after reading the new rule. It does not just change how applications are scrutinised. It replaces a selection made primarily by interview with a two-stage process in which every candidate sits a written examination, only those who qualify are interviewed, and the interview counts for at most 10 per cent. Applied to a recruitment already under way, that would affect the substantive rights of candidates. The amendment, the judges held, “cannot be termed merely a procedural amendment”.

The single judge had also relied on an affidavit of the RPSC Chairman to find that the Commission had itself applied the notification retrospectively to two earlier advertisements, for Occupational Therapist and Hospital Caretaker. The bench reproduced the affidavit. It states categorically that the Commission has not applied the notification retrospectively to any recruitment. The Occupational Therapist advertisement of 12 May 2022 still had its application window open when the notification came, the Hospital Caretaker advertisement was issued on 23 May 2022 itself, and in both cases corrigenda were issued, on 23 August and 16 November 2022, inviting fresh applications. That sworn statement had not been refuted. The finding of retrospective application could not stand.

Ajay Hasia was about college admission, and Lila Dhar said so

The second question was whether 40 per cent for the interview was excessive. The bench began with what Dr Mathur had not challenged. She had not challenged the Full Commission decisions of 2019 and 2022. She had not challenged the order of 20 April 2023 in Ramesh Kumar Jakhar v. State of Rajasthan, CWP 18047/2021, a petition filed at Jodhpur on 18 December 2021, before the application deadline, attacking the advertisement’s 100 per cent interview weightage; that petition was disposed of on the RPSC’s statement that due weight would be given to the screening test and academics, and the order had attained finality. And she had not challenged the unamended Rule 19 at all, only the advertisement issued in conformity with it; absent a challenge to the rule, the bench held, the challenge to the process in the advertisement could not be maintained. Nor was it her case that splitting marks between screening test, academics and interview was itself illegal. Her only case was that the interview should carry no more than 10 per cent under the amended rule, which did not apply.

On the law, the judges quoted Lila Dhar at length: the weight to be given to the interview must vary from service to service, is a matter for experts, and is not for courts to pronounce upon “unless exaggerated weight has been given with proven or obvious oblique motives”; 25 per cent for the Rajasthan judicial service was upheld there. Manish Kumar Shahi collected the later cases, including the Constitution Bench in Ashok Kumar Yadav, which found 33.3 per cent high but declined to strike down the selection, and Mehmood Alam Tariq v. State of Rajasthan, (1988) 3 SCC 241, which upheld 33 per cent qualifying marks in the interview for the Rajasthan state services; 200 marks for viva voce against 850 for the written examination did not offend Articles 14 and 16.

The single judge’s reliance on Ajay Hasia was misplaced, the bench held, because that case concerned admission to an educational institution, not public employment, and Lila Dhar had already said its observations were per incuriam insofar as they extend to public employment. As for Ashok Kumar Yadav, the Supreme Court in Anzar Ahmad had considered it and still upheld a 50:50 split between academic performance and interview, observing that it is for the government to decide what kind of competitive examination suits a post and that giving equal weight to academics had reduced the scope for arbitrariness rather than increased it. The RPSC was an expert body, had applied the formula uniformly, had used it in earlier recruitments, and faced no allegation of oblique motive. The 40 per cent weightage was not arbitrary.

Two and a half years, no explanation

The last question was estoppel and delay. Dr Mathur knew the terms of the advertisement and the rule as it stood, did not challenge them, and sat the 6 May 2022 screening test without objection. Ashok Kumar v. State of Bihar, (2017) 4 SCC 357, and Meeta Sahai v. State of Bihar, (2019) 20 SCC 17, the latter quoting Manish Kumar Shahi, bar a candidate who participates without protest from turning on the process afterwards; the object, as Meeta Sahai puts it, is to stop every disgruntled candidate seeking a second chance. She was estopped.

On delay, leaving aside the concealed Jodhpur petition, her first step was the impleadment application of 14 May 2024, nearly two and a half years after she applied and almost two years after the notification. The writ petition offered no justification. The single judge had found that she and similarly placed candidates had challenged the process before the screening test; the bench rejected that on two grounds. CWP 1777/2022 was about reservation backlog, so its petitioners were not similarly situated, and it was undisputed that she herself had challenged nothing before the test. A person invoking the extraordinary remedy must come at the earliest reasonable opportunity or explain the delay, and she had done neither.

Order

Both appeals were allowed. The single judge’s judgment of 10 January 2025 in CWP 15018/2024 was quashed and set aside, and the writ petition filed by Dr Rachita Mathur was dismissed. All pending applications were disposed of. Arguments concluded and judgment was reserved on 20 August 2026; the full judgment was pronounced on 27 October 2026.