New Delhi: The Supreme Court has set aside the Karnataka High Court's order, which quashed the appointment to 18 posts of lecturer in Home Science, saying it is a UGC-recognised subject for undergraduation and a postgraduate degree in any of its streams would make one eligible to apply for the lecturer's post.
A bench of Justices P S Narasimha and Aravind Kumar said: “The first duty of the Tribunal (Karnataka Administrative Tribunal) is to verify and examine the claims made by a party in the context of the Rule that governs the field. If the Rule does not prescribe a subject-wise speciality, there is no justification for the Tribunal or the High Court to examine the propriety, or for that matter, the beneficial effect of the rule”.
Justice Narasimha, who authored the judgment on behalf of the bench, said service jurisprudence must begin and end with rules that govern the process of qualification, recruitment, selection, appointment and conditions of service. The bench stressed that UGC also considers Home Science as a subject, with subject code no 12, as per the latest information bulletin issued by it towards National Eligibility Test conducted in December, 2023.
“The assumption of the High Court that Home Science is not a subject, instead it is a stream, or a genesis has no application to the recruitment of lecturers for an undergraduate program. For under-graduation, Home Science in itself is the subject”, said the bench.
“To teach undergraduates, the qualification prescribed is simply a post-graduation degree in the subject of Home Science. We repeat, it does not matter in which subject of Home Science that the post-graduation is obtained," the bench said.
The apex court said till date, the lecturers of Home Science in undergraduate programmes run by the government first grade colleges have been treated as one cadre and recruitment to the posts were advertised as such. "If one has to follow the logic adopted by the High Court, then the entire notification will collapse as the subjects of History, Economics, Political Science, Sociology etc are also mentioned without the so-called specialisations and they must be set aside by the same logic," said the bench, in a judgment delivered on February 22.
Justice Narasimha said for example, history has its specialised subjects in post-graduation such as ancient history, archaeology, epigraphy, modern Indian history, world history, European history, south-east Asian history, West Asian history etc.“The simple answer is that for under graduation, history is a subject in itself”, he said.
The apex court’s judgment came on a plea filed by appointed candidates. The bench upheld the recruitment process initiated in 2007 by the Karnataka Public Service Commission and affirmed the appointments.
The bench also said if the rule does not prescribe a subject-wise speciality, there is no justification for the high court to examine the propriety, or for that matter its beneficial effect.
“We conclude by holding that the High Court committed an error in not focusing on what the Rule provides for and whether the advertisement is in consonance with the Rule. If the High Court had confined itself to the basic features of judicial review, it would have avoided committing the error that it did”, said the bench.
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