The State’s argument was tidy: veterinarians sit in a different department from medical and dental doctors, governed by different rules, so they cannot claim the same career-progression pay. The Court answered that once the State itself pays all three the same scale and treats their service conditions alike, it cannot single out veterinarians when it comes to time-bound higher pay. It went further, in language that will be quoted: all three are healers of society, and the veterinarian heals voiceless beings who cannot describe their own ailments.
Jabalpur: The Madhya Pradesh High Court has dismissed the State’s appeal and upheld a direction granting Veterinary Assistant Surgeons and Veterinary Surgeons the benefit of the time scale of pay under the assured career-progression scheme on completion of 5, 10, 15 and 30 years of service, on par with dental surgeons and medical officers [State of Madhya Pradesh v. Dr. Vishnu Kumar Gupta and Others].
A Division Bench of Justice Anand Pathak and Justice B.P. Sharma held that the writ court had rightly extended the benefit, and dismissed the appeal as devoid of merit.
The dispute
The veterinarians, working in the Animal Husbandry and Dairy Department, had approached the writ court claiming the time scale of pay on par with dental surgeons and medical officers. Those doctors, working in the Public Health and Family Welfare Department, are extended the benefit of the higher time scale, known as kramonnati, on completing 5, 10, 15 and 30 years of service, whereas the veterinarians were granted it only on completing 8 years. The writ court, by an order of January 2026, allowed their petition and directed that the benefit be extended from the same date on which it was granted to the doctors, and the State appealed.
The State’s case was that the veterinarians belong to a different department and are governed by a different set of rules, so they cannot claim parity, and that the denial of the benefit did not infringe any fundamental right. The veterinarians responded that a 2008 notification revising the grant of the time scale across departments had placed both services on the same pay scale, and that a model employer could not discriminate between employees carrying the same scale.
The delay, and its condonation
The appeal came with a 13-day delay, which the State attributed to the process of obtaining legal opinion from the Advocate General’s office, routing the matter through the law department, and preparing the appeal, calling it procedural inertia. Citing the Supreme Court’s decisions on condonation of delay, including Sheo Raj Singh and Motilal Songara, the Court held that sufficiency of cause is the prime consideration, found sufficient cause made out, and condoned the delay so the appeal could be heard on merits.
Same work, same scale, no exception on higher pay
On the merits, the Court’s reasoning was rooted in the State’s own treatment of the two services. The State itself, it noted, treats veterinary surgeons on par with medical and dental surgeons while granting the same pay scale and other benefits; once they carry the same pay scale, the veterinarians could not be left out as an exception when it came to the higher pay scale or kramonnati. The petitioners had specifically pleaded that all these services carry equal pay, a plea the State had not rebutted in its reply.
The Court distinguished the decision the State relied on, State of Gujarat v. P.A. Bhatt, noting that it concerned different pay scales prescribed for allopathic doctors and doctors of indigenous medicine and turned on a classification based on educational qualification, which is not this case. It relied instead on a Division Bench decision of the Delhi High Court in Dr. Chandra Shekhar Sahukar v. Union of India, which had applied the concept of parity to hold veterinary surgeons entitled to the career-progression benefits received by medical and dental surgeons, and against which the Union’s special leave petition had been dismissed by the Supreme Court in 2018.
The Court stated the principle plainly: an employer cannot discriminate between two services rendering the same nature of job, although the targeted group may be different.
‘Healers of voiceless beings’
What lifts the judgment beyond a routine pay-parity ruling is the way the Court described the veterinarian’s work. Dental surgeons and medical officers care for the human body, it observed, while veterinary surgeons work in animal husbandry, a field peculiar in the stakes involved: the doctor must travel to the remotest areas across adverse terrain and weather to treat a patient that cannot speak on its own.
“…all three professionals are healers of society. First set of doctors heal human beings and veterinarian heals animals, which are voiceless beings, therefore, no distinction can be made.”
A human doctor, the Court noted, relies on the patient explaining the symptoms; the veterinarian has no such aid and must heal through intuition, diagnostic skill, patience and observation, so the job requires a special and robust skill set. It cited the American humorist Will Rogers, who had said that the best doctor in the world is the veterinarian, because he cannot ask his patient what is the matter and has simply got to know. Noting that animal husbandry in the State has taken the shape of an industry, with dairy and goatry farms and vaccination drives, and that veterinarians are in touch with the bulk of the village population on whose animal produce a majority depend, the Court held that their services cannot be discounted in any manner.
Why it matters
Beneath the warm language is a clean service-law proposition with wide reach: where an employer has itself equated two cadres on pay scale and service conditions, it cannot then carve one of them out of a time-bound higher-pay benefit by pointing to a difference of department. The department label is not the test; the nature of the work and the employer’s own prior treatment of the two services are. That the State did not rebut the plea of equal pay made the outcome close to inevitable, because the discrimination could not be defended on any principled basis once parity of scale was conceded.
The distinction the Court drew from P.A. Bhatt is worth noting for future cases. That decision upheld different pay scales founded on a real difference in educational qualification, MBBS against non-MBBS, which is a permissible classification. This case had no such foundation: the veterinarians were not asking to be paid more than their qualification warranted, but to receive, at the same intervals, a progression benefit the State already gives to others on the identical scale. The line, then, is between a classification grounded in qualification or the nature of the work, which survives, and a bare departmental distinction used to deny an otherwise equal benefit, which does not.
The judicial tribute to veterinarians, and the Will Rogers flourish, will travel further than the ratio, and deservedly so; but it is not mere sentiment. The Court’s point that a veterinarian treats a patient who cannot describe its symptoms, often in remote and difficult conditions, is offered as a reason why the work is at least as demanding as that of a human doctor, which is precisely why no distinction in career progression can be justified. For the veterinary services of the State, the practical effect is concrete: the higher pay scale at 5, 10, 15 and 30 years, from the same date as their medical and dental counterparts.
Case Title: State of Madhya Pradesh v. Dr. Vishnu Kumar Gupta and Others [Writ Appeal No. 1301 of 2026]
Bench: Justice Anand Pathak and Justice B.P. Sharma, High Court of Madhya Pradesh at Jabalpur
Date of Order: September 15, 2026 | Neutral Citation: 2026:MPHC-JBP:71590
Appearances: Additional Advocate General Janhavi Pandit for the appellant State. Advocate Manikant Sharma for the respondent.
Status: State’s appeal dismissed. Direction to grant veterinary surgeons the time scale of pay on par with medical and dental doctors upheld.