Disclosing candidate’s marks in recruitment tests not violation of privacy, says court

While partly allowing a petition, the Bombay High Court on Monday said that marks obtained by candidates in the recruitment process for public posts can be disclosed under the Right to Information Act, 2005 (RTI Act) and it won’t amount to violation of the privacy of candidates.
A bench of Justices MS Sonak and Jitendra Jain said, “Withholding such information unnecessarily allows doubts, however unreasonable, to linger, which is not very healthy in promoting transparency and accountability in the working of public authorities and public recruitment processes. Regarding RTI, it is repeatedly asserted that sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
The bench was hearing a plea filed by a 33-year-old student from Maharashtra’s Solapur, who had applied for recruitment to the post of Junior Clerk in the District Court at Pune in pursuance of an advertisement issued in March 2018.
He participated in the recruitment process and secured 289th rank in the Marathi typing test and 250th in the English typing test. He was called for the interview process, but his name was not included in the final list.
The petitioner, Onkar Kalmankar, enquired about it, but claimed he was not informed about his non-selection. Following that, he filed an RTI on February 20, 2019, for information about marks secured by him in the screening, Marathi typing and English typing tests, along with marks secured by the other 363 candidates in the screening test.
He also sought to know the criteria or the basis for selecting the selected candidates and other information in this regard with full details.
However, on March 6, 2019, the Public Information Officer declined to offer the petitioner any information on the ground that such information was “confidential”. Soon his appeals too were dismissed, following which he approached the high court in 2021.
Meanwhile, Kalmankar did get to know about his scores but advocate Uday Warunjikar, appearing for Kalmankar, submitted that the petitioner was entitled to know the marks secured by other candidates so that the petitioner could assess his relative position compared to the other candidates.
After going through all the arguments, the bench said, “in the context of a public examination for selection to a public post, we are doubtful whether the disclosure of marks obtained by the candidates would amount to any unwarranted invasion of the privacy of such candidates.”
The bench reasoned that confidence in the selection process would be boosted by disclosing the marks obtained by all the candidates in the written test and interviews.
“Transparency and accountability in a public recruitment process should be promoted. The disclosure of marks in a public recruitment process cannot be said to be purely personal information, the disclosure of which has no relationship to any public activity or interest or which would cause an unwarranted invasion of the privacy of the individual,” the court said.
Warunjikar submitted that the district judge at Wardha had disclosed the marks obtained by all the candidates on the Notice Board for a similar recruitment process. He submitted that there was no justification for the Pune District Court not to adopt the same standards of transparency.
Advocate Rajesh Datar, appearing for the authorities, submitted that the criteria for selection were already advertised and, in any event, discernible from the recruitment rules available in the public domain. Datar submitted that the information sought by the petitioner was vague, and the petitioner was embarking upon a fishing expedition.
Datar submitted that petitioner’s insistence upon disclosure of marks of other candidates involved a breach of their privacy, and such information constitutes third-party information.