Srinagar, April 25: The High Court of Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh has ruled that a recruitment process cannot be scrapped solely on the basis of a procedural lapse when there is no evidence of malpractice, terming such reasoning “illusory” and legally unsustainable.

A division bench comprising Chief Justice Arun Palli and Justice Rajnesh Oswal dismissed two intra-court appeals filed by the Union Territory administration, which had challenged a single-judge order quashing the cancellation of a recruitment process for engineering posts in the Jammu and Kashmir Energy Development Agency.
The dispute relates to 2017 advertisements for 77 posts of assistant engineers and junior engineers. The selection process included a written examination conducted by a private agency, M/s LM Energy and Software Private Limited.
The recruitment was cancelled in December 2019 on the ground that the agency had been engaged without issuing a Request for Proposal or Expression of Interest, which the administration claimed compromised transparency.
The writ court had set aside the cancellation and directed completion of the selection process, a decision now upheld by the division bench.
The High Court noted that the cancellation was based only on a “technical omission” and not on any allegation of fraud, malpractice, or irregularity in the examination or evaluation of candidates. It observed that the cause cited for cancellation was “illusory in nature.”
The bench held that while candidates have no absolute right to appointment, the State cannot act arbitrarily to abandon a selection process that has reached an advanced stage. It further stated that procedural lapses in appointing an agency do not invalidate the entire recruitment unless the integrity of the selection is affected.
Rejecting the government’s argument that new reservation categories introduced after the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019 justified cancellation, the court said such grounds were not part of the original order and cannot be introduced later.
Dismissing both appeals, the court upheld the direction to complete the recruitment process and ruled that procedural defects cannot override fairness when the selection process remains untainted.