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Anand Kumar Tiwari & Ors. v. High Court of Madhya Pradesh & Ors.

Writ Petition (Civil) · 2021 INSC 398Decided 12 Aug 2021
Writ Petition (Civil) No. 675 of 2018
Justice L. Nageswara Rao · Justice Aniruddha Bose

Background

A group of District Judges who were directly recruited to the Madhya Pradesh Higher Judicial Services challenged a 2015 seniority list that placed them below judges who had been promoted through a Limited Competitive Examination (LCE), even though an earlier provisional list had shown the direct recruits as senior. A second, related writ petition challenged Rule 11 of the 2017 Service Rules and sought retrospective application of a "40-point roster" system (directed by the Supreme Court in an earlier case) for fixing seniority between direct recruits and promotees.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court dismissed both writ petitions. It held that although the High Court delayed amending its seniority rules for many years (citing a pending related case before the Supreme Court), that delay did not entitle the direct recruits to have the new 2017 Rules applied retrospectively, since the Rules themselves expressly protected the seniority of officers already in service when the Rules came into force. The Court also upheld the High Court's approach of using the general civil service principle of "date of appointment/continuous officiation" to fix inter-se seniority for the period before the 2017 Rules, in the absence of any specific rule governing this during that period.

Lesson Learnt

New service rules changing seniority are ordinarily applied only prospectively unless they clearly say otherwise; employees cannot claim that a benefit introduced by new rules should be back-dated simply because the rule-making process took a long time.

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

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