While allowing part of the appeal, the Bombay High Court on Monday said that marks obtained by candidates for public office can be disclosed under the Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act) and would not amount to a violation of the law. privacy of candidates.
A bench of Justices MS Sonak and Jitendra Jain said, “Withholding such information allows doubts, even if it is unreasonable, to continue, which is very wrong in promoting transparency and accountability in the functioning of public authorities and public recruitment processes. Regarding RTI, it has repeatedly asserted that the light sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
The bench was hearing a petition filed by a 33-year-old student from Maharashtra’s Solapur, who had applied for the post of Junior Clerk in the District Court in Pune following an advertisement issued in March 2018.
He participated in the recruitment process and got 289th rank in Marathi typing test and 250th rank in English typing test. He was called for the interview process, but his name was not included in the final list.
The applicant, Onkar Kalmankar, asked about it, but said he was not informed about his non-selection. After that, he filed an RTI on February 20, 2019, to get details about the marks obtained by him in the examination, Marathi typing and English typing test, and the marks obtained by 363 other students in the examination test.
He also wanted to know the criteria or basis for selecting the candidates and other information in this regard with full details.
However, on March 6, 2019, the Public Information Officer refused to provide the applicant with any information on the grounds that the information was “confidential”. His appeals were soon rejected, after which he went to the supreme court in 2021.
Meanwhile, Kalmankar knew about his scores but lawyer Uday Warunjikar, representing Kalmankar, said that the applicant has the right to know the marks obtained by other candidates so that the applicant can check his position relative to other candidates.
After dealing with all these arguments, the bench said, “In the case of a public examination for appointment to a public office, we doubt that the disclosure of the marks obtained by the candidates would amount to any invasion of privacy of the candidates without reason. .”
The bench felt that confidence in the selection process would increase by disclosing the marks obtained by all the candidates in the written test and interviews.
“Transparency and accountability in the public recruitment process should be encouraged. The disclosure of marks in the public recruitment process cannot be said to be personal information, the disclosure of which is not related to any work or public interests or may cause unwanted intrusion of personal privacy,” said the court.
Warunjikar has moved that the district judge in Wardha should disclose the marks obtained by all the candidates in the Notice Board for the same recruitment process. He submitted that there is no reason why the Pune District Court should not adopt the same standards of transparency.
Advocate Rajesh Datar, representing the authority, submitted that the selection criteria has been advertised and, in any case, is visible in the recruitment rules available in the public domain. Datar submitted that the information sought by the applicant was not clear, and the applicant was busy with a fishing trip.
Datar submitted that the applicant’s insistence on disclosing the marks of other candidates involved a breach of their privacy, and that information included third party information.
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