The Supreme Court analytically split a public recruitment into three stages — advertisement, selection by interview, and the formal appointment decision — and held that the absence of statutorily mandated official members from the appointing Board's meeting under amended Rule 3 did not vitiate an otherwise fair and transparent recruitment; the defect was curable by reconvening a properly constituted Board, not fatal, especially where the appointees bore no responsibility and had served over a decade.
In 2023, a five-judge Constitution Bench held that the Kerala High Court could not impose a viva-voce cut-off after the selection process had run. The judgment grounds substantive legitimate expectation in Article 14 and sets out when such an expectation arises and when public interest may defeat it.
The Supreme Court held that a candidate from a vertically reserved category (SC/ST/OBC) who scores above the general cut-off must be adjusted against the open seats on merit, not counted against the reserved quota. The rule holds even where the candidate also claims a horizontal reservation such as for women. The open category is open to all on merit.
A Division Bench of the Karnataka High Court allowed a person with locomotor disability to be appointed as Assistant Accounts Officer under the PwD quota, holding that suitability cannot be judged on a medical certificate alone but must include a functional assessment of the candidate's actual ability to do the job. A digest of the facts, the holding under the RPwD Act 2016, and what it means for public-employment selection.
On March 2026, a two-judge bench struck down the State's 40–60% disability eligibility cap for an Assistant District Attorney post, ordered the appointment of a 90%-disabled advocate, and imposed ₹5 lakh costs on the State.
Calcutta HC cancels the entire 2016 WBSSC panel of ~25,753 appointments where OMR manipulation made tainted and untainted inseparable; Supreme Court upheld it.
On 10 April 2006, a five-judge Constitution Bench led by Sabharwal CJ and authored by Balasubramanyan J held that public employment must follow Article 16 — competitive, advertised, merit-based recruitment to sanctioned posts — and that temporary, casual, daily-wage, ad hoc or contractual appointees made outside that scheme acquire no fundamental right to regularisation however long they may have served. The judgment drew a sharp doctrinal line between 'irregular' and 'illegal' appointments, granted a one-time, fixed-date paragraph-53 exception for irregular appointees who had completed ten years of service on sanctioned posts as of 10 April 2006, and overruled *Dharwad PWD*, *Daily Rated Casual Labour v. Union of India* and *Ashwani Kumar v. State of Bihar*. The decision remains the gravitational centre of Indian regularisation jurisprudence two decades on.
On 7 November 2024, a five-judge Constitution Bench held that recruitment criteria — the 'rules of the game' — cannot be altered after the selection process has begun, unless the rules so permit.
On 11 March 2026, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Rajesh Bindal and Vijay Bishnoi held in M. Thanigivelu v. Tamil Nadu Electricity Board that training is part of the service for the purposes of seniority — and that an administrative Board Proceeding cannot retrospectively re-date the seniority of direct recruits to align them with promotees. The judgment restates a longstanding service-jurisprudence principle in the language of the TNEB Service Regulations and clarifies the limits on the State employer's discretion to reorder service hierarchies through administrative instruments.
A Division Bench of the Karnataka High Court — Justice D.K. Singh and Justice T.M. Nadaf — has held that the Chief Minister's Office should not directly entertain or interfere in transfer and posting decisions for government and public-undertaking employees. The substantive direction: no transfer request for Group B or C employees should be entertained by the CMO; the matter should end at the department level. The doctrinal architecture engages the separation-of-functions principle that has been developing in Indian administrative law, the constitutional protection of merit and integrity in public administration, and the practical concern that political-office interference in routine personnel decisions distorts both administration and democratic accountability.