A.P. High Court dismisses pleas challenging reservation process in Group-2 recruitment

The Andhra Pradesh High Court on Tuesday dismissed all the petitions filed regarding reservation in recruitment for Group-2 services by the AP Public Service Commission (APPSC).

Several candidates approached the High Court challenging the reservation points and sought cancellation of the Group-2 notification issued in 2023. They demanded that the reservation roster be followed in accordance with the Supreme Court guidelines and requested the court to cancel the old notification and direct the issuance of a fresh one. After hearing the arguments, the court dismissed the petitions.

In early 2025, the High Court allowed the APPSC to conduct the Group-2 Mains exam despite petitions, emphasising that halting the process would harm thousands of candidates who had cleared the prelims. The court ruled that while the Mains exam would continue, all final recruitment decisions would remain subject to the judgment on the reservation dispute, a key point raised by the petitioners.

In response to the notification for Group-2 services, the APPSC received as many as 4,83,525 applications. Of them, 4,04,037 candidates appeared for the screening test and 92,250 of them qualified for the Mains. Of them, 79,451 (86.12 %) candidates appeared for Mains conducted on February 23, 2025 and 2,538 of them were called for certificate verification.

Speaking to The Hindu, the counsel for the State government (the respondents), Thandava Yogesh, who argued that the petitioners were seeking invalidation of the entire recruitment process after having failed either in the preliminary or Mains examination, said entertaining such petitions would open floodgates of litigation by lakhs of unsuccessful candidates and paralyse the functioning of the recruiting agency.

He said the Commission had acted strictly as per G.O. Ms. No. 5, which vests discretion with the APPSC to fix the qualifying marks and ratio for shortlisting candidates for the Mains examination.

Referring to the introduction of horizontal reservation for women, PWD, ex-servicemen and sports persons, raised by the petitioners, Mr. Yogesh said it was in compliance with binding judicial precedents. He said though this G.O. was issued well before the notification, the petitioners did not challenge it in other recruitments conducted on the same basis. Their belated challenge in the Group-2 recruitment was clearly an afterthought, he said.

Mr. Yogesh said the grievance raised on the roster points was totally misconceived, as the notification itself did not fix roster points. “Allocation of roster points arises only at the stage of final selection,” he pointed out. He said the key point was that the intention of the petitioners was not genuine. They raised a roster point grievance as a mere excuse to secure another attempt after being unsuccessful in the examination. “Whether roster points are fixed or not cannot improve or diminish the marks secured by a candidate in either the prelims or Mains. Hence, the grievance is a post failure thought, raised only after they found themselves unsuccessful,” he maintained.

He said recruitments to public posts cannot be indefinitely stalled, pointing to the fact that the last Group-2 notification was issued in 2018 and thousands of aspirants had been waiting for years.