Be Caesar's wife, publish marks to rule out suspicion: Madras high court tells TNPSC

Times of India: Chennai: Thursday, March 13, 2014.

Noting that Caesar's wife must be above suspicion, the Madras high court on Wednesday directed the Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC) to make public the marks secured by all candidates who wrote the Group-II examination in November 2012.

Justice S Nagamuthu, rejecting the TNPSC's claim that in view of the confidential nature of the exercise all marks could be published only after the final selection is made, said: "The TNPSC stand that marks secured by candidates in the written examination and the relevant cut off will be published only after the final selection is over, cannot be accepted."

Referring to the TNPSC's stand that individual marks of candidates are furnished if the candidate concerned sought the information under the Right To Information (RTI) Act, Justice Nagamuthu said: "When marks can be disclosed to individual candidates under the RTI Act, I do not find any reason as to why such information should be withheld without making it public thereby driving thousands of candidates to approach the TNPSC under the RTI Act."

Underlining the need to avoid any room for arbitrariness in public employment, Justice Nagamuthu said: "As a well-known saying 'Caesar's wife must be above suspicion goes, in order to inform the general public that the TNPSC has been fair in its approach, it ought to have published the marks of candidates before going to the next stage of calling candidates for the interview."

He then directed the TNPSC to publish the marks of all candidates within four weeks.

The matter relates to a writ petition of A Gopikrishnan, a Scheduled Caste candidate, who said he was not called for interview despite the fact that he would have secured at least 210 marks out of the maximum of 300 marks. When he sought to know the exact marks secured by him, the TNPSC refused to part with the information.

The TNPSC, on its part, said the candidate was not within the zone of consideration for being called for interview and that the final mark list and ranks would be published only after completion of the ongoing selection process.