A Division Bench of the Andhra Pradesh High Court consisting of Justices Ravi Nath Tilhari and N. Harinath on Thursday granted a partial stay on the order of Justice Venkateswarlu Nimmagadda (dated March 13, 2024) in the writ petition that challenged the validity of the AP Public Service Commission (APPSC)’s Group-I Mains examination notified in the year 2018.
The Bench stayed the single Judge’s direction to APPSC which was to set aside the list of eligible candidates dated May 26, 2022, while posting the case for further hearing on March 27.
The other directions of Justice Venkateswarlu were to conduct the impugned examination afresh, evaluate the answer papers strictly in accordance with the APPSC Rules and complete the whole process in six months from the date of receipt of the order pronounced on March 13 after being reserved on August 21, 2023.
The APPSC challenged the single Judge’s order which, according to its senior counsel S. Satyanarayana Prasad, went beyond the scope of the writ petitions. After an elaborate hearing on March 21, the Bench passed the above interim order.
The main grievance of the petitioners was that after an earlier judgment (of the High Court), manual evaluation was proposed and it was abandoned midway and a fresh manual evaluation was done. Some unsuccessful candidates in the manual evaluation had, just before the schedule for oral interviews, filed the writ petitions contending that around 62% of those qualified in digital valuation were not qualified in the manual evaluation, therefore, gross injustice was done.
Jandhyala Ravi Sankar, advocate for the petitioners, said that points ‘a’ and ‘c’ of the judgment (that doing second and third valuations was in violation of the APPSC Rules and to conduct the examinations afresh) were intact in Thursday’s interim order.
