The Bombay High Court at Goa, on September 11, 2025, dismissed four petitions filed by candidates who had cleared exams for Junior Engineer and Technical Assistant posts in the Public Works Department but were denied appointments under the OBC category. A division bench of Justices Bharati Dangre and Nivedita P. Mehta upheld the government’s decision to reject their applications because the caste certificates submitted were either too old or issued after the recruitment cut-off date of September 27, 2021.
The petitioners argued that caste is a permanent identity and cannot “expire,” calling the rejection a violation of equal opportunity and questioning the legality of a 2000 circular that prescribes a three-year validity for OBC certificates. The state countered that what matters is not only caste but non-creamy layer (NCL) status, which is income-based and subject to change. The court agreed, noting that eligibility must be assessed as of the cut-off date and that certificates from 2013, 2014, or 2018 could not prove NCL status for the 2020–21 financial year.
While dismissing the petitions, the bench criticised the Goa government’s three-year validity rule, calling it arbitrary and inconsistent with the purpose of reservations. It recommended adopting a model like Rajasthan’s, where certificates are valid for a year but can be extended annually through affidavits. The judges directed the state to revisit and revise its rules to create a fairer and more rational system.
The judgment presents a classic legal and ethical conundrum: where does the line between necessary procedural discipline and the overarching goal of social justice lie? In dismissing the petitions of four meritorious Other Backward Class (OBC) candidates denied public employment due to an “expired” caste certificate, the court upheld a strict interpretation of administrative law. Yet, in doing so, it has ignited a critical debate about whether such rigidity creates a bureaucratic labyrinth that ensnares the very individuals for whom the reservation policies are designed to uplift. While the judgment is founded on sound procedural principles, it stands vulnerable to powerful counterarguments rooted in constitutional purpose, legal doctrines of proportionality, and the fundamental nature of eligibility itself.
The court’s rationale is built upon a clear and legally consistent foundation. It astutely differentiates between a person’s immutable caste identity and their dynamic “Non-Creamy Layer” (NCL) status, which is contingent on fluctuating annual income. The judgment correctly establishes that for a recruitment process, eligibility must be fixed at a specific point in time—the cut-off date, which in this case was the last day for application submission, September 27, 2021. From this legal standpoint, the petitioners’ failure was not in their identity, but in their inability to furnish timely proof of their economic status for the relevant period. The court reasoned that any certificate issued before or after this window could not definitively establish their NCL status on the crucial date. By grounding its decision in the settled law of cut-off dates, the judgment projects an image of procedural correctness and consistency, ensuring a level playing field where rules are applied uniformly to all.
However, this procedural formalism, while legally sound, arguably sacrifices the spirit of the law at the altar of its letter. The most compelling counterargument posits that a certificate is merely an affirmation, not a creation, of a pre-existing fact. A candidate either belonged to the NCL category on September 27, 2021, or they did not. The certificate is simply the official evidence of that status. To disqualify a candidate who was factually eligible on the cut-off date because their documentary proof was obtained later is to prioritise administrative convenience over substantive reality. This line of reasoning finds strong support in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Ram Kumar Gijroya vs. Delhi Subordinate Services Selection Board, which cautioned against allowing procedural technicalities to deny employment to meritorious reserved-category candidates. The Goa judgment, by deviating from this spirit, risks transforming the reservation system from a vehicle of empowerment into an obstacle course of paperwork.
Furthermore, the doctrine of proportionality demands that an administrative action not be more drastic than necessary to achieve its objective. Here, the objective is to verify a candidate’s NCL status. The penalty for a delayed submission of this proof was the complete and irreversible cancellation of their candidature. This is a disproportionately harsh outcome. A more proportionate response would have been to allow the candidates, upon being shortlisted, a window to produce a certificate that retroactively validated their NCL status for the required period. Denying a high-scoring individual a career for a curable defect is not a measured administrative response; it is a punitive one that undermines the larger constitutional goal of ensuring representation.
This sense of injustice is compounded by the state’s own culpability in the matter. The very foundation of the government’s rejection, that is, a Goa government circular from the year 2000 prescribing a three-year validity for OBC certificates, was deemed “arbitrary” and illogical by the high court itself. It is a legally tenuous position for the state to enforce a rule so strictly when the rule itself is flawed. Moreover, the administration’s own significant delay, caused by the scrapping and rescheduling of the written examination, makes its rigid adherence to the original 2021 timeline seem manifestly unfair. The state cannot, in good faith, disrupt a process and then penalise candidates for failing to perfectly navigate the disrupted timeline.
Ultimately, the judgment in Pednekar & Ors. highlights a deep-seated tension in Indian jurisprudence. While the court’s adherence to the principle of the cut-off date is unassailable in theory, its application in this context appears to neglect the unique, remedial nature of reservation law. The petitioners were not individuals who lacked the fundamental qualifications of merit or social identity; their failing was purely procedural. The judgment, in its final analysis, champions a system where the timeliness of a document holds more weight than the merit of a candidate and the constitutional mandate of social justice. While the petitioners lost their case, the court’s directive to the Goa government to reform its flawed circular is a crucial silver lining. It is an admission that the system itself is broken, and a powerful reminder that the path to equality must not become so encumbered by procedure that it ceases to be a path at all.
Kaustubh Naik is a doctoral student at the Department of South Asia Studies, University of Pennsylvania.