‘RBI staff can’t be termed regular govt employees’

His candidature was rejected by the Tamil Nadu Public Service Commission (TNPSC) for stating that he was not a government servant despite working for the RBI. Allowing the appeal from E Manoj Kumar whose petition was rejected by a single judge, a division bench comprising Justice KK Sasidharan and Justice PD Audikesavalu said, “If we go by the tenor of the question, ‘Are you a government employee?’, the bank employees who are claiming that they are government employees would suffer disqualification, as they have given a wrong statement. We therefore reject the contention taken by TNPSC.”

On November 9, 2016, Manoj Kumar had applied for Group I services through TNPSC website. In the column for declaration of employment status was the question: “Are you a Government employee?” If the answer is “No”, there is no need to state anything further.

While he had answered ‘no’, few other candidates employed in banks replied in affirmative. Despite being qualified in all other aspects and obtained the no-objection certificate from the RBI as required, his candidature was rejected. Following this, he filed a writ petition which was dismissed by a single judge, who upheld TNPSC’s decision to reject the application.

However, referring to certain provisions of RBI and noting that the question offered no option to the candidate to explain that he was a bank employee, the division bench said, “The fact that Central government has persuasive control over RBI would not make its employees Central government employees.”

Based on this, bench directed the commission to forward the name of appellant to government for taking further action to give him order of appointment within one week.