Paying a Waived Fee Cannot Cost Promised Age Relaxation: P&H High Court Orders HSSC to Consider TGT Aspirants

The Commission's TGT (Sanskrit) advertisements of 2016 and 2019 were cancelled; Clause 11 of Advertisement No. 2 of 2023 granted those earlier applicants age and HTET relaxation and exempted them from the fee (paras 3, 17). The petitioners, given unique IDs marking them as earlier applicants, paid the fee as a precaution because the portal had no option for the exemption (paras 4, 7, 20). Though they scored above the last selected candidates, a notice of 28.07.2024 excluded them as overage, treating them as fresh applicants because they had paid (paras 5, 11).

The Court framed the question as whether a candidate can be denied age relaxation, granted because of earlier cancelled advertisements, merely for not availing the additional fee exemption (para 13). It called the Commission's stand a "Doctrine of Negative Fee Waiver", turning diligence into disqualification (para 16). The Commission itself generated the unique IDs only for earlier applicants, its portal accepted their fee and their applications despite dates of birth placing them outside Clause 6, and they sat the written test (paras 12, 21, 24). Its admission that the system could not map the options exercised showed digitisation in name only (para 22). A public recruiting authority is not a fee-collecting agency; its task is to see whether eligibility is satisfied, and a technological oversight cannot defeat eligibility the State had deliberately preserved (para 23). It described the case as res ipsa loquitur (para 24).