Amid Discrepancy Claim, Allahabad HC Asks UPPSC To Produce PCS-J Candidate's Answer Sheets To Compare His Handwriting

A bench of Justice Siddhartha Varma and Justice Manish Kumar Nigam passed this order while dealing with the candidate's (Shravan Pandey) claim that his handwriting, consistent across all other papers, was notably absent in the English answer sheet.

He also claimed that the answers in the Hindi paper's answer sheet were scored off in the last 3 to 4 pages.

Confronted by the situation, the Court decided that all six answer sheets of the petitioner be produced before the Court so that his handwriting could be matched across all the answer sheets.

“This would enable us to meet see whether the handwriting in the English answer sheet was in his handwriting,” the Court said while posting the matter for hearing on June 7, 2024.

In brief, it was the petitioner's case that he appeared in the U.P. Judicial Service Civil Judge (Junior Division) (Mains) Examination 2022 in May 2023. The results were announced on August 30, 2023, and marks were made public in November 2023.

Dissatisfied with his marks, the petitioner filed a Right to Information Act application in January 2024, and on March 27, 2024, he received details of his marks in the six papers.

Upon discovering he received only 47 marks out of 200 in the English paper, he requested to view his answer sheets. Not satisfied with the marks, the petitioner prayed that six papers' answer sheets be shown to him under the Right to Information Act.

When the answer sheets were shown on May 25, 2024, the petitioner found that the petitioner's handwriting, as it existed in all the other papers, was not to be found in the English answer sheet. He also found that the answers in the answer sheet of the Hindi paper were scored off in the last 3-4 pages.