“ This humble Respondent would like to draw attention of this Hon‘ble High Court that the petitioners, have tried to impress upon the fact that they have liberty to give preference in their own way for allocation to a particular cadre and it has nothing to do with the provisions of Para 8(iii) of the Cadre Allocation Policy-2017. What the petitioners aspires that can be explained by an example that a candidate does not opt Zone, IV (West Bengal, Sikkim, Assam- Meghalaya, Manipur, Tripura and Nagaland), then as per the contentions of the petitioners, he would not be considered for this Zone at the time of allocation along with all those candidates who eventually opted this Zone. What happens in that case, if Mr. A ranked 5th does not opt for Zone-IV whereas Mr. B ranked 4th opts for this Zone, then Mr. B higher in rank than Mr. A will be considered for allocation to a cadre in Zone-IV, there will be chances that Rank 4th gets allocated to any of the cadres in this Zone but at the same time Rank 5th has taken the liberty to skip this Zone and is to be initially considered for allocation to a cadre other than this Zone-IV. Hence, despite being meritorious, Rank 4 does get allocated to a cadre in Zone-IV but Rank 5 skipped the chances of being allocated to a cadre in this Zone-IV which is his un-preferred zone. This phenomenon had been foreseen and thus the modalities given in Para 8(iii) have been made in order to ensure that allocation is run in a manner explained in Para 5.2 above to ward off such situations. It is most humbly submitted that the policy applicable prior to implementation of the extant policy, the candidates were required to indicate order of preferences for all the cadres. It was very evident at that point of time that cadres in North Eastern part of the country used to be least preferred cadres. If what the petitioners are contending is accepted or treated as correct, a situation may arise that, all the cadres of North East, which used to be least preferred cadre, may not be opted by most of the candidates in the present scheme too, thereby creating a situation where
