Bhubaneswar: The matter of alleged irregularities in Assistant Section Officer (ASO) recruitment exam conducted by the Odisha Public Service Commission (OPSC) reached the Supreme Court as the apex court today admitted a petition in this regard.
The Supreme Court, while admitting a petition filed by Rajat Mishra challenging the verdict of the Orissa High Court in the matter, issued notice to the Odisha Government, OPSC and other parties. It asked them to submit reply within four weeks.
The next hearing of the case will be held after four weeks.
Earlier, the Orissa High Court had upheld the merit list of 1104 candidates published by the OPSC for the ASO recruitment exam.
A division bench of the High Court had also directed for resumption of the selection process.
“We apprised the High Court that the OPSC has the power to shortlist the candidates. The commission can either fix subject-wise qualifying marks or aggregate qualifying marks as per its decision. The same was mentioned in the advertisement for the recruitment exam,” the lawyer appearing for the OPSC had said.
Notably, the recruitment exam was conducted on 27 August 2022 while the results were declared on 7 November 2022.
Some candidates had moved the High Court alleging irregularities in the examination. The controversy sparked over introduction of ‘qualification mark rule’ by the OPSC during the process of determining the merit list. The new rule requires candidates to attain a minimum score in each subject, known as the sectional cut-off.
Applicants had raised complaints alleging that the OPSC did not mention the new qualifying mark rule in its initial advertisement and instead introduced it after the completion of the written exams.
