In a powerful judgment delivered on 22 December 2025, the Delhi High Court sent a clear message to public institutions: reservation for Persons with Benchmark Disabilities (PwBD) must be real, meaningful, and rooted in equality, not reduced to a symbolic exercise.
Allowing a writ petition filed by Dr. Sachin Kumar, the Court quashed the recruitment process adopted by the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration (NIEPA) for a PwBD-reserved post of Assistant Professor. The Court held that the declaration of the post as “none found suitable” was not an assessment of merit, but evidence of a deeply flawed and exclusionary process. This judgment is a reaffirmation that access to public employment for persons with disabilities is a constitutional right, not a concession.
iProbono India represented the petitioner with Senior Advocate Swathi Sukumar, along with iProbono India team members Karuvaki Mohanty and Shrutika Pandey and panel lawyers Rishabh Sharma and Ambica Sood.
“None Found Suitable” Points to a Broken Process
At the heart of the case was the recruitment to four Assistant Professor posts, one explicitly reserved for PwBD candidates. Thirteen PwBD candidates were shortlisted and interviewed. Yet, when results were declared, the institution stated that none were found suitable.
The Court found this conclusion deeply troubling. There were no disclosed evaluation criteria, no cut-off marks, no internal distribution of interview scores, and no recorded reasons explaining why all PwBD candidates were rejected.
Viewing this outcome through what it described as a lens of constitutional morality, the Court observed that such a result reflects “not the failure of the candidates, but the failure of the process itself.”
The recruitment advertisement itself was found to be vague and opaque. It did not specify subject-wise requirements, evaluation parameters, or how relaxed standards and reasonable accommodation for PwBD candidates would be applied. In effect, reservation existed on paper, but not in practice.
Reasonable Accommodation Is a Legal Duty
A central issue before the Court was the complete absence of reasonable accommodation. The respondents argued that removing the upper age limit for PwBD candidates amounted to accommodation. The Court rejected this outright.
Relying on earlier Supreme Court jurisprudence, the Bench reiterated that reasonable accommodation is not charity or discretion. It is a positive legal obligation flowing from Articles 14 and 16 of the Constitution and the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016.
Accommodation requires structural changes that account for systemic disadvantage. Cosmetic or facial concessions do not meet this standard. Accepting such hollow compliance, the Court warned, would allow institutions to routinely reject PwBD candidates and render disability reservation meaningless.
Interview-Only Selection Held Arbitrary
The Court also examined the legality of a 100% interview-based selection process. There was no written test, no structured marking framework, and no predefined evaluation matrix. Even within the interview, there was no internal distribution of marks or recorded reasoning.
The Court held that such an unstructured and unguided viva-voce process violates constitutional guarantees of equality and fairness. While regulations may permit interviews, they do not authorise opaque and subjective decision-making.
As the Court put it, a purely interview-based process without objective safeguards creates “an opaque zone of discretion inconsistent with constitutional governance.”
PwBD Vacancies Cannot Be Rewritten
The Court further struck down the conversion of the unfilled PwBD vacancy into an EWS–PwBD vacancy. Disability reservation, the Court clarified, is horizontal in nature. Altering the category fundamentally changes who gets excluded.
Such conversion was held to be illegal and contrary to binding government instructions, which require unfilled PwBD vacancies to be carried forward without changing their character.
Why This Judgment Matters
This decision goes beyond one recruitment process. It speaks directly to how institutions understand inclusion, equality, and access.
The Court made it clear that participation in a flawed process does not silence candidates from challenging it, especially when constitutional and statutory rights are at stake. More importantly, it reaffirmed that disability reservation cannot survive as a formality. It must be backed by transparency, structure, and genuine accommodation.
For iProbono India, this judgment reinforces years of work advocating for access to justice, inclusive governance, and the realisation of rights for persons with disabilities. It recognises that exclusion is often built into systems, and that equality requires institutions to change, not candidates to “fit in”.
As public bodies across the country continue to recruit, this judgment serves as a reminder: inclusion is not about ticking boxes. It is about designing processes that give everyone a fair chance to succeed.
