Chhattisgarh HC: scrapping an ongoing recruitment needs real reasons, not just inconvenience

The Chhattisgarh High Court quashed a decision of Government Medical College, Ambikapur to cancel its 2022 recruitment advertisements for Class III and Class IV posts and shift the process to the State's Professional Examination Board (VYAPAM). The petitioners, candidates who had applied, cleared the earlier stages and were called for document verification, challenged the cancellation as arbitrary. The college's General Body had recorded that over one lakh applications had been received and that processing them would take too long, so the advertisements were cancelled. Justice Bibhu Datta Guru noted that a later official communication from the Dean put the actual figure at 55,335 applications against 448 posts, a figure the State could not reconcile with the one-lakh number used to justify the cancellation.

The Court held that while no candidate has an indefeasible right to appointment merely by participating in a selection process, and the State can revise its recruitment mechanism, the power to abandon an ongoing, substantially advanced selection cannot be exercised on an unexplained factual premise. Relying on the Supreme Court's decisions in Shankarsan Dash v. Union of India and Tej Prakash Pathak v. Rajasthan High Court, the Court held that such discretion remains subject to Articles 14 and 16 of the Constitution, and the State must show a rational, bona fide basis before it can lawfully discontinue a process at an advanced stage. The college was directed to resume and complete the earlier recruitment within three months.