A Division Bench of the Kerala High Court on Monday upheld the condition in the recruitment notification by the National Thermal Power Corporation Limited (NTPC) that candidates applying for the posts of Assistant Law Officer should have cleared the Common Law Admission Test for Postgraduate (CLAT PG).
The Bench comprising Justice A.K. Jayasankaran Nambiar and Justice Mohammed Nias C.P. passed the verdict while allowing an appeal filed by NTPC against a single judge’s order holding that the prescription of such a qualification violated the right of the citizen to equal opportunity in public employment guaranteed under Article 16 of the Constitution.
The Bench observed that the finding of the single judge could not be upheld. Article 16 only spoke of equality of opportunity and not the opportunity to achieve equality. All that was required was a public advertisement that enables all “eligible” persons to compete for selection on merit.
Setting aside the single judge’s order, the Bench also observed that the basic principle underlying Article 14 of the Constitution was only to ensure that law must operate equally on all persons under the like circumstances and a discretionary power conferred on the employer to fix the eligibility standards or qualification could not be held to be discriminatory.
The court observed that the selection process did not suffer from the vice of discrimination or arbitrariness.
