The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court ruled that ad hoc service cannot be ignored when considering employees for promotion. It held this applies if the initial appointment was lawful and the employee served continuously throughout thereafter.
The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court held that ad hoc service cannot be ignored while considering employees for promotion, provided the initial appointment was made through a lawful process and the employee has served continuously.
A division bench of Justices Shekhar B Saraf and Manjeev Shukla dismissed two special appeals filed by the state government, thereby affirming an earlier order in favor of the petitioners.
The court stated that ad hoc service, when followed by regularisation, must be counted together with regular service for determining promotion eligibility.
It also held that if a junior employee has already been promoted, a senior employee is entitled to the same promotion with effect from that date, even if the senior’s regularisation occurred later.
The dispute involved Anil Kumar and Shailendra Singh, who were appointed as junior engineers in the Housing and Urban Planning Department on an ad hoc basis in 1986 and were subsequently regularised.
The controversy arose after employees appointed after them received promotion to assistant engineer effective January 18, 1995, while the petitioners were denied equivalent benefits.
A single-judge bench had earlier granted relief to the petitioners. Challenging that order, the state government argued that because the petitioners were not regular employees at the relevant time, they were not entitled to retrospective promotion.
Rejecting this argument, the high court relied on principles laid down by the Supreme Court of India and observed that similarly placed employees had already been given the benefit, adding that denial of the same to the petitioners would be unjust.
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