In Brief
A teacher was appointed based on a caste certificate issued to her as a member of a Scheduled Caste following her marriage to a Scheduled Caste person. Twenty years later, an inquiry found she was born in the Agarwal community (general caste). Her caste certificate was cancelled and she was terminated. The High Court upheld the termination. The Supreme Court held that while caste is determined by birth and the cancellation was justified, it exercised discretion under Article 142 to convert her termination to compulsory retirement, given her 21 years of unblemished service and the fact she had neither committed fraud nor misrepresented her caste before authorities.
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