The Madras High Court dismissed a writ petition filed by IAS officer Dayanand Kataria (IAS:1989:TN) and upheld the validity of the Centre’s 360-degree appraisal/multi-source feedback system for evaluating the performance of all Indian Service officers, in State government service, for empanelment so that they may apply for vacancies that arise under the Government of India (GoI).
According to Mr. Kataria, an IAS officer of the 1989 batch of the Tamil Nadu cadre, he was empaneled to serve as Joint Secretary level officer under the GoI in 2012. Such empanelment was assessed in terms of the 1996 office memorandum issued by the Union Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances, and Pensions.
He was due for empanelment as an Additional Secretary and then Secretary in the subsequent years. However, it did not happen due to the multi-source feedback system. This system required the government to ask seniors, peers, juniors, external stakeholders, and current secretaries for their opinions about individual officers.
Hence, he approached the court to declare the 360-degree appraisal system illegal, void, and in violation of natural justice principles. Not finding any merit in his plea, the Division Bench said, it did not find any illegality in the Centre’s decision to assess an officer’s performance by looking beyond his/her Annual Confidential Report (ACR).
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The Bench in its verdict said that if an employer wants certain qualities in its employees, especially at the senior level, it cannot be said to be arbitrary. By no stretch of the imagination can it be said that these are vague. Moreover, the Court wrote that the expert committee report is not the end of the world when it comes to empanelment, and that there was also a separate review panel that would conduct an independent assessment and submit a report to the Special Committee of Secretaries (SCOS).
In turn, the SCOS assists the Cabinet Secretary in reviewing the matter and presenting it to the Cabinet Committee on Appointments, which has final authority over the empanelment list. “Therefore, the fear of the writ petitioner that the expert panel could act in an arbitrary manner has also been resolved,” the Bench added.
