A Bench comprising Justices A K Mathur and Markandey Katju gave the ruling on an appeal against a decision of the Madras High Court quashing the appointment of B Ramakichen as Deputy Director (Agriculture) in the Government of Pondicherry.

The appointment was done after an advertisement of the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), inviting applications from persons having MSc Degree in Agriculture and two-year experience in extension work/soil/input analysis. However, the advertisement nowhere mentioned that the requisite experience should be after obtaining the MSc degree. The appellant had the requisite experience, but obtained before he got his MSc degree.

The UPSC after short-listing called only those applicants for interview who had acquired the experience after getting the degree. The appellant moved the Central Administrative Tribunal, Chennai, which, by an interim order, allowed him to appear in the interview. Since the appellant had topped the merit list, he was appointed for the post. However, on an appeal by the Central Government, the High Court quashed the appointment holding that it was open for the UPSC to restrict the number of candidates to be called for the interview by adopting a short-listing method and there was no irrationality or illegality in the method of short-listing adopted by it.

Allowing the appeal, the Bench said that it is a well-settled law that the selection body can resort to a short-listing procedure if there are a large number of eligible candidates, but if a prescribed method of short-listing has been mentioned in the rule or advertisement then that method alone has to be followed.

“In the present case, no doubt the UPSC had resorted to an objective and rational criteria of short-listing but the advertisement does not mention that the two-year experience must be after getting the MSc degree in Agriculture. Hence, we cannot add words to the advertisement and we must read it as it is because an executive agency must be rigorously held to the standards by which it professes its actions to be judged. This rule does not merely rest on Article 14, which requires fairness and non-arbitrariness in executive action, but has an independent existence as a rule of administrative law which has been judicially evolved as a check against exercise of arbitrary power by the executive authority,” the Bench observed.