Patna, April 11: Several unsuccessful candidates of preliminary test (PT) of the 27th Bihar Judicial Services 2009 approached the high court seeking a direction to Bihar Public Service Commission (BPSC) to publish a fresh result of the preliminary examination.

The petition filed by Pankaj Kumar, Ranjeev Kumar, Ranjeet Ranjan among others contended that the commission has published results after deleting 25 questions out of 250 asked in the PT, which is a glaring example of exercise of power.

Of 150 questions in the law paper, 19 were deleted without any reason, similarly six from 100 questions in general studies were deleted and hence, the marks obtained in both papers were not added while publishing the result of the PT, the petition said.

The petition filed through advocate Kumar Brijnandan submitted the commission, which published results after almost 15 months after conducting the examination, did not notify prior to the publication of the result that 25 questions have been deleted.

The deleting of questions after such a long time has been resorted with a view to distort the fairness of the entire recruitment process and such arbitrary deletion does not facilitate the selection of the best candidates from the available pool, especially when the answers of deleted questions were not in dispute, Brijnandan submitted.

Aggrieved and shocked by the unwarranted and arbitrary publication of the preliminary result of the PT exam, a representation was filed before the commission and other authorities concerned for the rectification of mistakes and anomalies committed during the preparation of the result but the representation was not considered by them, Pankaj Kumar, one of the candidates, told The Telegraph over phone from Delhi.

The petitioner also questioned the commission’s decision for not following the 1:10 ratio of the available vacancies to the successful candidates depriving many candidates from SC and ST category from appearing in the main examination.

According to the directions passed by the Supreme Court in the Malik Mazhar Sultan case, which says the authority conducting the exam should clear the names of candidates 10 times the number of vacancies, but the commission declared the PT result in ratios of 1:9 for general category, 1:3.5 for SC and 1:3 for ST category.

In fact, in view of the directions of Malik Mazhar Sultan’s case, the number of candidates declared successful in the preliminary examination should have been 2,170 and not 1,752, which the commission did in this case.

BPSC had conducted PT exam for filling up 217 vacant posts of civil judge (junior division) on December 30, 2009 and the result was published on March 11, 2011. Of 217 posts, 35 and two posts were reserved for SC/ST category and accordingly 350 and 20 candidates from these categories should have been cleared in the PT exam. However, 121 and six students from the two groups were declared successful.