A. Velayutham v. The State of Tamil Nadu
Background
The appellant was appointed as a daily-wage watchman by the Tamil Nadu government in 1992 through the local employment exchange. A 2006 government order promised that daily-wage employees who had completed ten years of service by 1 January 2006 would be regularised. Despite qualifying, the appellant's service was not regularised until 2010, after 18 years, not ten. He won before a single judge of the Madras High Court, who ordered regularisation to run from the completion of ten years' service, but a Division Bench reversed this, relying on a later 2013 government order and a Full Bench precedent about "backdoor" appointments.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court restored the single judge's order, holding that the 2013 government order came into existence only after the appellant's case was already decided and could not be applied to defeat his already-accrued right. It also held that the appellant's appointment, having come through a proper employment-exchange selection process, was not a "backdoor entry" of the kind the Full Bench precedent dealt with, so that precedent did not apply to him. The 2006 order's language was clear and unambiguous: employees with ten years' service by the cut-off date were entitled to regularisation from that point, not from whenever the government eventually got around to issuing the order.
Lesson Learnt
A government cannot sit on its own beneficial policy for years and then apply a later, less favourable rule retroactively to defeat a right an employee had already earned: legal rights are generally determined by the law as it stood when the claim first arose.