Read Time: 08 minutes

Synopsis

The Supreme Court has on February 22, 2024 said that Home Science in itself is a subject recognised by the University Grants Commission (UGC) for under graduation and and post graduation degree in any of its stream would make one eligible to apply for the post of lecturers.

A bench of Justices P S Narasimha and Aravind Kumar set aside the Karnataka Administrative Tribunal and the High Court's judgement which had held that the notification calling for applications for recruitment to the 18 posts of lecturers in the department of Home Science is illegal for not providing the subject wise specified categories.

The court said it does not require detailed reasoning to find the error in the judgment of the High Court.

"The High Court committed an error in not focussing 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," the bench said.

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, it pointed out.

The court further said, "Service jurisprudence must begin and end with rules that govern the process of qualification, recruitment, selection, appointment and conditions of service. Appointments to these posts are in the nature of ‘status’, which means that the service and its conditions can be unilaterally changed by the amendment of the Rules."

The fact that an undergraduate student would be required to choose a specialisation when he takes up a PG programme has no bearing on the qualification of the lecturer teaching the undergraduate students, it said.

Further, the assumption of the High Court that Home Science is not a subject, instead it is a stream, has no application to the recruitment of lecturers for an undergraduate programme, the court added. 

"For under-graduation, Home Science in itself is the subject. In fact, 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. 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 bench also noted till date, the lecturers of Home Science in undergraduate programme 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," the bench 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, the court added.

Acting on appeals by the appointed candidates, the court upheld the recruitment process initiated in 2007 by the Karnataka Public Service Commission and affirmed the appointments made.

After examining the rules, the bench said, "We found no difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that the requirement, as assumed by the Karnataka Administrative Tribunal and the High Court, is not a mandate of the recruitment Rules. Even otherwise, the Tribunal and the High Court have erroneously based their conclusions on policy considerations relating to how such a breakup would be beneficial to the candidates".