Saurabh Malik
Chandigarh, July 6
Amidst debate and protests over the Agnipath scheme, shortlisted IAF candidates have moved the Punjab and Haryana High Court seeking completion of the recruitment process initiated vide a notification dated December 11, 2019.
Directions have also been sought for declaring the final result of the examination conducted in November 2020. In their petition against the Centre and Central Airmen Selection Board, Sourabh and four other candidates said the provisional selection list dated May 31, 2021, had already been published and is pending for the last one year.
The petitioners through counsel Pardhuman Garg submitted that the petitioners’ main grievance was that they applied for selection test for “Intake 01/2021” to join as airmen in Indian Air Force in “Group X Trades and Group Y Trades”. They cleared “all the stages of the selection procedure, cleared physical and medical test”. The provisional selection list was published by the respondents on May 31, 2021, and their name surfaced in the list. “It is almost one year since the date of the publication of the provisional selection list, but the final result was not yet declared.”
The petition said one of the petitioners filed an RTI in the office of the respondents seeking information as to why the result had been delayed. “Till date, no reply has been given by the respondents.”
Garg said the question of law for the court’s consideration was whether the respondents could delay the result of the examination conducted in November 2020 and January 2021 without any reason.
The other question for adjudication was whether the respondents’ action of not completing the recruitment process in a time-bound manner was “absolutely illegal, arbitrary, unjust, without jurisdiction, violative of the Article 14 and 16 of the Constitution and also the well-settled law laid down by this court and the Supreme Court of India”?
