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8. Learned counsel for the petitioners has placed reliance upon a judgment rendered by this Court in WPSS No. 825 of 2020 (Umesh Chandra Upreti vs. State of Uttarakhand & others). Para 7 of the said judgment, on which reliance has been placed, is extracted below:-

"7. Mr. Lalit Samant, learned counsel for the petitioners submits that it is settled law that rules of the game cannot be changed mid-way and the selection process has to be completed as per the service rules, which were applicable on the date of commencement of promotion exercise. He, however, submits that the promotion exercise was commenced on 20.06.2019 when advertisement was issued by respondent no.3; while, the requirement of having B.Ed./L.T. was introduced by amending the Rules in the month of December, 2019. Thus, according to him, the amended Service Rules cannot be made applicable to the promotion exercise, which commenced in the month of June, 2019. He, however, submits that a Division Bench of this Court has dealt with identical question in Writ Petition (S/B) No. 139 of 2021. Perusal of the said judgment reveals that the question before Division Bench was whether the amendment made in the Rules subsequent to commencement of selection process can be pressed into service for treating a person ineligible for promotion, who was otherwise eligible. Paragraph nos. 5 & 6 of the said judgment are reproduced below:-
"47. The case in hand is distinguishable from those cases where the mode of selection was altered by fixing the cut-off marks after the selection process had completed/commenced; whereas in the present case only wrongful calculation in the number of vacancies in different categories had been corrected in order to satisfy the percentage of reservation against various categories as per the provisions of the U.P. Reservation Act, 1994. Such correction cannot be said to be changing the rules or basis of selection. The eligibility criteria was not changed.
and "OBC category". The High Court was not right in making a generalised observation that decrease in the number of vacancies against "general category" has illegally deprived 3303 candidates from appearing in the interview."

14. Hon'ble Supreme Court in the case of Aarya Zonal Manageer, Bank of India vs. K. Babu & another reported in (2019) 8 SCC 587 has held in para 14 that "if there is any change in qualification / criteria after the notification is issued but before the completion of the selection process and the employer / recruiting agency seeks to adopt the change it will be incumbent on the employer to issue a corrigendum incorporating the changes to the notification and invite applications from those qualified as per the changed criteria and consider the same along with the applications received in response to the initial notification."