Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC) has in Madras High Court admitted to a mix up in evaluation of answer sheets of Combined Engineering Services examination candidates last year, but claimed it did not adversely affect any genuine candidate as the mistake was detected and rectified in time.
A submission to this effect was made before Justice S Nagamuthu, when a batch of petitions by candidates whose names figured in the first provisional list of selected but deleted in an amended list published by the TNPSC later, came up for hearing.
In February 2013, the TNPSC conducted the written tests for nearly 340 engineers' posts in various departments. On October 4, 2013 the commission published a list of shortlisted candidates for certificate verification.
Later, the TNPSC scrapped the entire list without any explanation and published an 'amended list' of shortlisted candidates on October 4, 2013.
Assailing the action of the TNPSC as arbitrary and illegal, many candidates filed petitions challenging the amended list.
TNPSC admitted to a goof up on its part as two versions of keys of the question papers got interchanged.
"Since the error was deducted, an expert committee was constituted, and based on its opinion re-evaluation was undertaken by entering the correct key answers into the computer," it said.
The commission assured the court that the mistake had been rectified and the faulty list withdrawn, and added that no deserving candidate suffered because of the mix up.
Justice Nagamuthu accepted the explanation offered by the TNPSC and said expert committee's report made it crystal clear that the re-evaluation has been done properly and that the amended list had meritorious candidates.
He, however, said the TNPSC was not "absolutely blameless", noting that the commission should have owned up the error and should have made it public in the official website stating the reasons for revaluation.
"But, unfortunately the TNPSC had failed...Had this information been made public, I am sure many petitioners would not have rushed to this court with these writ petitions."
He then dismissed all the petitions, saying they warranted no intervention from the court.
