Forged TET Certificate Renders Appointment Void Ab Initio, No Regular Departmental Enquiry Needed Before Termination: Allahabad High Court
The Allahabad High Court has held that where the certificate on which a public appointment rests is found to be forged, the appointment is void ab initio and its cancellation is not a punitive termination attracting the Uttar Pradesh Government Servant (Discipline and Appeal) Rules, 1999. It held that a show-cause notice and compliance with the broad principles of natural justice are sufficient.
The Court added that this applies only where the forgery is conclusively established, and not where the material shows a mere discrepancy calling for verification.
Justice Manju Rani Chauhan held
“The governing principle, therefore, is that the 1999 Rules regulate the disciplinary consequences of misconduct committed by a person holding a legally valid appointment; they cannot be invoked to confer procedural sanctity upon an appointment which, having been procured through established fraud or forged credentials, was void from its inception.”
The petitioners were appointed as Assistant Teachers in upper-primary sections of basic schools after appearing in the Uttar Pradesh Teachers Eligibility Test (TET) 2013. After they joined, their educational documents were checked with the examining Boards, found to be genuine, and they were paid salary.
A Government Order dated 20.07.2018 directed an inquiry into appointments made after 2010, and a three-member district-level committee ran the roll numbers on the petitioners' TET-2013 certificates against the online records, where no matching entry was traced. Salary was stopped on 28.10.2020 and, after show-cause notices and replies, the District Basic Education Officer, Etawah terminated their services by order dated 13.06.2022. One of the five petitioners, Anupam Yadav, has since died.
The petitioners argued that no fraud or misrepresentation had been alleged against them, that the same certificates had been verified by the District Basic Education Officer on 05.08.2021 and found genuine. It was pleaded that their services were ended without an effective hearing or a regular departmental enquiry.
The respondents submitted that the online records of the Examination Regulatory Authority held no result for the petitioners. It was submitted that they had shown no authentic record from the competent authority backing their certificates, and that natural justice cannot be used to save an appointment built on a forged qualification.
The Court relied on Amar Singh v. State of U.P. and Rajvir Singh v. State of U.P., where in the latter case the special appeal was dismissed after counsel for the appellants turned down the Division Bench's offer to have the certificates examined by the Government Examiner of Questioned Documents and chose not to pursue the case further. That, the Court stated, strengthened the conclusion that the certificates were not genuine.
Relying on the Division Bench decision in District Basic Education Officer v. Smt. Punita Singh, the Court held that a show-cause notice and fair treatment are enough where the documents behind the appointment are conclusively found forged, because cancelling such an appointment does not punish a validly appointed employee but recognises that there was never a lawful appointment at all.
On the plea of long service, it observed
“The principle admits of no ambiguity: fraudulent entry cannot, by efflux of time, metamorphose into a lawful appointment; nor can years of service transmute a nullity into a right.”
The Court found that the petitioners had been served with show-cause notices, had filed detailed replies and had been allowed to bring the original certificates or any other supporting record on the file, and that the certificates were then verified and found not to be genuine.
Finding no reason to interfere with the order dated 13.06.2022 under Article 226 of the Constitution, the Court dismissed the writ petitions.
Case Title: Vivek Kumar v. State of U.P. and 6 others 2026 LiveLaw (AB) 721
Case Citation: 2026 LiveLaw (AB) 721