(1.) This group of writ petitions under Article 226 of the Constitution are filed by the learned Advocates to challenge the result of the preliminary test conducted by the Bihar Public Service Commission for recruitment to 217 vacancies in the Subordinate Judiciary of the State of Bihar.
(2.) The main challenge in these writ petitions is four-fold. First, the Bihar Public Service Commission hereinafter referred to as 'the Commission' has no authority to conduct preliminary examination prior to the competitive examination contemplated under the Bihar Judicial Service Recruitment Rules, 1955. Second, the disputed preliminary examination was conducted on the basis of the Bihar Civil Service Judicial Branch Recruitment Amendment Rules, 2008 ignoring the subsequent amendment by Amendment Rules of 2009. Prior to the amendment by the Amendment Rules of 2009 the reservation was confined to the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates, whereas under the Amendment Rules of 2009 the benefit of reservation has been extended to Backward Class and the Extremely Backward Class candidates also. Thus, by not following the Amendment Rules of 2009, the candidates belonging to the Backward Class and the Extremely Backward Class have been deprived of the benefit of reservation. In other words, they are compelled to compete with the other candidates in General Category. Third, the dispute is in respect of the omission of 25 questions from consideration. According to the Petitioners some of those 25 questions did not have the correct option but the others had the correct option. The candidates who have attempted such questions and answered correctly stand to disadvantage on account of the omission of those questions from consideration. Fourth, the Petitioners have challenged the decision of the Commission to allow only 10 per cent of the total examinees to take the competitive examination contrary to the Supreme Court direction to allow the candidates to take competitive examination in the proportion of 1:10 i.e. for every single vacancy at least 10 candidates should be allowed to take the competitive examination.
(3.) Some of the Lawyers have referred to the question papers and the alternative answers. They have tried to demonstrate that most of the questions omitted from consideration had the correct answer.