Supreme Court rejects petitions against BPSC’s prelims exam conducted in December
The Supreme Court said it was unfortunate that recruitment examinations were getting held up because of questions being raised about them
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected a batch of petitions alleging paper leak during a preliminary examination conducted by the Bihar Public Services Commission (BPSC) on December 13 last year, stressing that the tendency to challenge every public examination in the courts caused difficulties in governments recruiting people.
A bench of justices Dipankar Datta and Manmohan dismissed a batch of petitions filed by individual candidates who appeared in the 70th Combined Competitive Examination (Preliminary) conducted by BPSC on December 13, 2024 raising questions about the integrity of the examination across 18 centres following allegations of paper leak, identical questions from mock papers of coaching centres, and use of loudspeakers.
Dealing with the allegations, the court said BPSC had conceded to irregularities at only one centre – Bapu Pariksha Parisar in Patna where re-examination was conducted.
Solicitor general Tushar Mehta, who appeared for the Bihar government, told the top court that a committee of 12 experts examined the questions and found that only 2 of 150 questions were identical to the ones in mock papers in circulation. Further, said every centre had four sets of question papers with the questions in different sequences making it impossible for any one paper to be announced or circulated.
The bench was satisfied with the submission and dismissed the petitions.
“While sitting in court, we see every examination is getting challenged. It is unfortunate no examination is getting to a conclusion and recruitment is being held up,” the bench said. A case related to the UP police recruitment process in 2014 is also pending before the bench.
The court noted that the standard of conducting recruitment examinations was not “very high”. “Everyone is playing with the insecurities of each other. You are suspecting everyone of foul play. But nobody is willing to lift the level of debate.”
Senior advocates Anjana Prakash and Colin Gonsalves, who appeared for the candidates, challenged the Patna high court’s decision of March 28 that did not find anything wrong in the conduct of the BPSC preliminary examination. The commission was allowed to hold the Mains examination.
The court played a video provided by Prakash to back up the claim about the paper leak in other centres as well. But after going through the clip, the bench said there was nothing to indicate that the video belonged to a centre other than the one where the government conceded irregularities.
“Today in digital age, anything can be invented. We cannot believe what we are seeing or hearing...When you make such serious allegations, we will insist on such formalities. Let the BPSC go ahead with the examination. People are concentrating on taking the Mains exam. Why should we hear this at this stage,” the court said.
Gonsalves also said 24 questions in the examination were taken from the mock papers circulated by coaching centres. The bench told the senior lawyer that ahead of every examination, questions bank books are circulated. It said, “It would be desirable that coaching centres are not involved...If the curriculum is the same, out of thousands of questions, some questions from question banks can be in circulation.”
Nearly 4 lakh candidates appeared in the preliminary examination conducted by BPSC of which about 12,000 were at the Bapu Pariksha centre where paper leak took place and a retest was conducted.
