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Amarkant Rai v. State of Bihar & Ors.

Civil Appeal · Neutral citation not assigned (Civil Appeal No. 2835 of 2015)Decided 13 Mar 2015
Civil Appeal No. 2835 of 2015
Justice V. Gopala Gowda · Justice R. Banumathi

Background

The appellant was appointed in 1983 as a daily-wage Night Guard at a college affiliated with Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Bihar, by the college Principal, who, it later emerged, was not actually authorized under the Bihar State Universities Act to make such appointments. Despite the Principal repeatedly recommending him for regularization over the years, the University terminated him in 2001; he was reinstated by High Court order in 2002, but a University committee later rejected his regularization claim, and the Patna High Court upheld that rejection, holding his original appointment was invalid.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court distinguished between an "illegal" appointment (made to an unsanctioned post or to someone lacking qualifications) and a merely "irregular" one (made without proper competitive process, but against a genuine sanctioned post by someone otherwise qualified), following its own earlier Constitution Bench ruling in Umadevi's case. Because the University had known of and tacitly accepted the appellant's appointment for years without challenging it, and he had worked against a sanctioned post for over two decades without any court order protecting his job, his case fell within the exception recognized in Umadevi for irregular (not illegal) long-serving employees. The Court set aside the High Court's order, directed the authorities to regularize him retrospectively from January 2002 for seniority and pension purposes, and awarded him monetary benefits from January 2010 onward.

Lesson Learnt

A government employee who has worked for many years in a genuinely sanctioned post, even if the original hiring process was flawed or done by someone lacking full authority, may still qualify for regularization as a one-time measure if the defect was merely "irregular" rather than outright illegal: long, tacitly accepted service counts in the employee's favour.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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