The Supreme Court on Monday appointed its former judge, Justice P. Venkatarama Reddy, to undertake re-evaluation of papers of over 600 unsuccessful candidates who had appeared in the 2014 Delhi Judicial Services' main exam to ascertain if any of them could be called for a final interview before appointment.
Asking Justice Reddy to commence the exercise on or before January 10, a bench of Justice Dipak Misra and Justice Prafulla C. Pant said that the exercise of the re-evaluation of papers of the candidates who did not make to the final list after the main exam may be completed in six weeks time.
The court made it clear that the re-evaluation exercise by Justice Reddy, a former chairman of the Law Commission, would in no way unsettle the already successful 15 candidates - 13 from general category and two from reserved category - and any successful candidate emerging from the re-evaluation exercise would have no claim on any seniority over the 15 already selected.
It said that in the case of general category candidates the parameter would the marks obtained by the successful candidates, and the same yardstick would be followed in the case of candidates in reserved category but this would be undertaken only if vacancies under reserved category are available.
In 2014 there were 80 vacancies but only 15 could be filled up as only 15 candidates succeeded in main exam and they succeeded in interview also. Of the 80 vacancies - 55 were in general category and 25 in reserved category.
The court direction came on a PIL by the NGO Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL) which has sought the quashing of the main exam result and re-evaluation of the answer-sheets by an independent expert committee headed by a retired high court judge as it alleged "unreasonable and arbitrary" evaluation.
For 80 vacancies, 9,033 candidate had appeared in the preliminary exam and 659 who succeeded appeared in main exams held on October 10 and 11, 2014.
The results that were declared on May 1 this year - eight months after the examination - saw only 15 candidate selected for interview to be held on August 6 and all of them declared successful.
