JAYDEEP KUMAR ABHAY Vs. STATE OF BIHAR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC for short) came out with an advertisement for conducting 66thCivil Services Combined Competitive Examination on 16/9/2020. The Cut-off- date for determination of maximum qualifying age had been fixed as 1/8/2020. The petitioners have admittedly crossed the upper age limit as on the said cut-off-date. It is their case that the BPSC has not been able to perform its duty of conducting the Combined Competitive Examination (CCE for short) on annual basis and it was taking about 4-5 years on and average to issue an advertisement for appointment to the aforesaid civil services in the State of Bihar. This resulted into combining of many competitive examinations into one, through a single advertisement. Accordingly, 40thto 42ndcommon CCE was held in 2007, 53rdto 55thcommon CCE was held in 2011, 56thto 59thcommon CCE was held in 2014 and 60thto 62ndcommon CCE in the year 2016. Thereafter, 63rd, 64th, 65thCCEs have been admittedly held on annual basis through advertisements issued in the years 2017, 2018 and 2019 respectively.

(2.) As has been noticed at the outset, advertisement for 66thCCE came to be issued by the BPSC in 2020. The petitioners, in the present writ application, are seeking a direction to the respondents to grant appropriate age relaxation to enable them to participate in the upcoming 67thCCE, primarily on the ground of failure on the part of BPSC to conduct CCE examination annually and thereby causing hardship to the petitioners because they missed to get adequate number of chances to appear in the examination.

(3.) The petitioners have disclosed in paragraph 6 of the writ petition, number of attempts availed by them in the previous examinations held by the BPSC. Relevant part of paragraph-6 is being reproduced hereinbelow :-