HC adjourns hearing on Group II examination row

After making the rounds of various benches since the written exams were conducted in 2016 to recruit Group 2 officers, batch of petitions including appeals came up for hearing on Thursday. A division bench comprising Justice V. Ramasubramanian and Justice P. Keshava Rao adjourned the hearing to next week after hearing senior advocates who defended the appellants challenging the single judge verdict which prevented candidates who used whiteners or ‘double bubbled’ on OMR sheets.

Counsels for the appellants said that the invigilators or examiners appointed by the Telangana State Public Service Commission had misguided the candidates on filling the OMR sheets. This necessitated the candidates to ‘double bubble’ the anwers. Counsels said the whitener was supplied by the examiners to the candidates to correct errors.

Earlier, the single judge bench had declared that candidates who have done wrong bubbling, double bubbling, or used whiteners were to be excluded in preparation of verification of certificates and merit list.

The TSPSC issued a notification in 2015 and its supplementary in 2016 for Group-II services for a total of 1,032 vacancies for which 7,89,985 candidates had applied and 4.90 lakh took the examination.