Tej Prakash Pathak v. Rajasthan High Court: the rules of the game cannot change midway

The facts in brief

In 2009 the Rajasthan High Court, on its administrative side, advertised 13 posts of translator under the Rajasthan High Court Staff Service Rules, 2002. The advertised process prescribed a written examination followed by an interview. It stated no minimum-marks requirement.

After both stages had been completed, the administrative side resolved that only candidates scoring 75 per cent or above would be selected. This benchmark was introduced after the game had been played — after the candidates had sat the examination and the interview under a notification that contained no such cut-off. Several candidates who had cleared the notified process but fell below the new threshold challenged the change.

The dispute reached a three-judge Bench, which, doubting the consistency of the existing authority on mid-process changes, referred the question to a Constitution Bench. On 7 November 2024, the five-judge Bench of Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud and Justices Hrishikesh Roy, P.S. Narasimha, Pankaj Mithal and Manoj Misra answered the reference.

The question referred

The conflict the Constitution Bench was assembled to resolve had been festering across two- and three-judge decisions for years. On one side stood K. Manjusree v. State of A.P., which held that selection criteria fixed at the outset cannot be altered midway. On the other stood observations, drawn in part from State of Haryana v. Subash Chander Marwaha, that were read to give recruiting authorities a wider latitude to set benchmarks and to decline to fill posts.

The referred question, distilled, was this: can the criteria for selection — eligibility, the benchmark, the method of shortlisting — be changed after the recruitment process has commenced? And if so, under what constraints?

The rule, and its limits

The Bench held that the eligibility criteria and selection norms fixed by the advertisement and the extant rules cannot be changed mid-process — absent express permission in the rules or the advertisement itself. The metaphor is exact: a candidate enters a competition on the terms announced; to change those terms after they have competed is to defeat the legitimate expectation on which they relied, and to do so arbitrarily offends Article 14.

But the Bench did not freeze recruitment in amber. Where the rules are silent, recruiting bodies retain a power to devise a procedure to bring the process to a logical end — provided that procedure stays within the constitutional envelope.

The principle is therefore two-sided. The default is stability: criteria fixed at the outset govern. The exception is a permitted change, but any such change must independently satisfy Articles 14 and 16 — it must be transparent, non-arbitrary, non-discriminatory, and bear a rational nexus to the object. A retrospective minimum-marks cut-off, introduced after the examination and interview to exclude qualified candidates, satisfies none of these and is impermissible.

Reconciling the precedents

The decision reaffirmed K. Manjusree and clarified the reach of Subash Chander Marwaha. The two lines are not in genuine conflict once the issues are separated. Marwaha addresses a different question — whether placement in a select list creates a right to appointment. The Constitution Bench confirmed that it does not: a candidate in the select list has no indefeasible right to be appointed, and the State may, for bona fide reasons, decline to fill advertised vacancies.

But that discretion — not to fill posts — is categorically distinct from the power to rewrite the selection criteria after the fact. The State may, in good faith, choose not to appoint from a valid list. It may not retrospectively raise the bar to exclude candidates who cleared the bar that was actually advertised. Keeping these two propositions apart is the conceptual work that dissolves the apparent inconsistency in the earlier authority.

Why the case matters

As a Constitution Bench pronouncement, Tej Prakash Pathak is now the controlling authority on recruitment fairness. It is cited in virtually every service matter that turns on a changed cut-off, on scaling or normalisation introduced after an examination, or on added eligibility conditions imposed after notification.

The decision complements the service-law spine — the Umadevi line on regularisation, and the compassionate-appointment jurisprudence — by supplying the governing rule for the process of selection rather than the substance of appointment. It will govern disputes arising from large public examinations, where the temptation to adjust benchmarks after results are known is strongest, and the litigation around added document, age or qualification requirements introduced after a notification has issued.

Expect the downstream cases to cluster around two phrases. The first is "where the rules permit": litigants will dispute whether a given rule or advertisement actually authorised the change in question. The second is the Article 14 and 16 nexus test: even where a change is permitted, courts will ask whether it was transparent, non-arbitrary and rationally connected to a legitimate object. Tej Prakash Pathak supplies the framework; its application will be worked out case by case.

The fairness principle, settled

The lasting contribution of the judgment is to convert a contested intuition into settled doctrine. The intuition — that you cannot change the rules after people have relied on them — is as old as the metaphor the Court adopted. By grounding it in Articles 14 and 16, reconciling the divergent precedents, and confining the State's genuine discretion to the distinct question of whether to fill posts at all, the Constitution Bench has given recruitment law a stable centre. A candidate now competes on terms that, once announced and acted upon, the State cannot lawfully rewrite to their disadvantage.

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Sources

1. Supreme Court Observer — "Altering Rules on Appointment to Public Posts: Tej Prakash Pathak v. Rajasthan High Court": https://www.scobserver.in/cases/altering-rules-on-appointment-to-public-posts-tej-prakash-pathak-v-rajasthan-high-court/
2. SCC OnLine — "Eligibility criteria for Government jobs cannot be changed midway unless allowed by existing Rules: Supreme Court": https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2024/11/07/supreme-court-eligibility-criteria-government-jobs-changed-midway/
3. Bar & Bench — "Eligibility criteria for government jobs cannot be changed midway during recruitment: Supreme Court": https://www.barandbench.com/news/eligibility-criteria-government-jobs-cannot-changed-midway-recruitment-supreme-court