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The Court held that it could not read the words “or equivalent” into the advertisement when the employer had deliberately omitted them. Such an exercise would not constitute interpretation but would amount to rewriting the terms of the notice. The judgment clarified that the determination of equivalence is not a mere comparison of course titles or overlapping subjects; it requires an assessment of academic standards, course content, duration, practical exposure, institutional objectives, and the suitability of the qualification for the specific post.

Further, the Court noted that the recruitment in question was an all‑India process. Permitting different States or universities to apply their own equivalence regimes after the advertisement had been issued would lead to varying eligibility criteria being applied to the same recruitment, thereby undermining the uniformity essential to public employment selections. The Court stated that such flexibility would be permissible only if the employer itself had incorporated equivalence into the advertisement or otherwise recognised it under the governing recruitment framework.

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In the absence of any such recognition, the Court directed that the recruitment must proceed strictly in accordance with the qualifications prescribed in the advertisement. Justice Narula underscored that fairness in public recruitment is owed not only to the candidate before the Court but equally to those who refrained from applying because the advertisement did not recognise their qualifications. The discipline of public recruitment, the Court observed, requires the judiciary to hold the employer to the criteria it notified rather than to reconstruct those criteria after the selection process has commenced.

The petition was consequently dismissed, and NSC’s decision to reject Haribhau’s candidature was upheld. The ruling reinforces the principle that recruitment notices bind both applicants and employers, and that judicial intervention cannot expand the notified eligibility criteria once the selection process has been set in motion.

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