AP & Telangana State Head – Anandam Dundi:–
The Telangana High Court on Thursday granted an interim stay on an earlier single-judge order dated November 18 that set aside the selection list released by the Telangana Public Service Commission (TGPSC) in October 2019 for filling 1,032 vacancies in Group-II Services notified in 2015-16.A division bench of Chief Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh and Justice G M Mohiuddin was hearing an appeal against the single judge’s order filed by two of the successfully recruited candidates, who are presently working as deputy tehsildars. While granting an interim stay, the division bench posted the matter for consideration of merits after six weeks.
The bench has directed all parties concerned to file their counter-affidavits.The selected candidates were appointed in 2019, and the court agreed with the appellants’ argument that it was not fair to quash their appointments now. The appellants contended that all 1,032 qualified candidates should have been made a party to the writ petition that set aside the appointments of 14 successful candidates.
The appellants also argued that the single judge directed the TGPSC to follow the guidelines of the technical committee’srecommendations, which it had already done during the recruitment process. The appellants further maintained that the single judge failed to consider appeals in the previous judgments cited as precedent in its order.
Before the bench of Justice Nagesh Bheemapaka, the petitioners had, in their 2019 writ petition, contended that the TGPSC unlawfully called for interviews and subsequently appointed candidates who had engaged in prohibited practices, specifically scratching, tampering, erasing, and using whiteners in Part B of their Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) sheets during the Group-II Services Examination.In his order dated November 18, 2025, Justice Bheemapaka had quashed the appointments of respondents 3 to 16 and directed respondent-2 TGPSC to “forthwith recast the provisional selection list by excluding all such disqualified candidates and to include petitioners, in accordance with their merit, for appointment to the respective posts in Group-II Services”.
The bench had granted TGPSC four weeks to complete the exercise.The single judge, referring to recommendations made by the same judge in a writ petition of 2017, had directed TGPSC to adhere to the recommendations, particularly relating to the maintenance of transparency, physical verification of OMR sheets, video-recording of evaluation and publication of all relevant details on its official website to ensure accountability and to restore public confidence in its functioning.