Lucknow, March 20 The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court on Friday held that ad hoc service cannot be ignored when considering employees for promotion, provided the initial appointment was made through a lawful process and the employee has served continuously.
A division bench comprising Justices Shekhar B Saraf and Manjeev Shukla, while delivering the ruling, dismissed two special appeals filed by the state government, thereby upholding an earlier order in favour of the petitioners.
The court observed that ad hoc service, when followed by regularisation, must be counted along with regular service for determining eligibility for promotion. It further ruled that if a junior employee has already been promoted, a senior employee would be entitled to promotion from the same date, even if their regularisation occurred later.
The case relates to 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 later regularised. A dispute arose after employees appointed after them were promoted to assistant engineer with effect from January 18, 1995, while the petitioners were denied similar benefits.
A single-judge bench had earlier granted relief to the petitioners.
Challenging the order, the state government argued that since the petitioners were not regular employees at the relevant time, they were not entitled to retrospective promotion.
Rejecting the contention, the high court relied on principles laid down by the Supreme Court of India and noted that similarly placed employees had already been granted the benefit, adding that denial of the same to the petitioners would be unjust.