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Hemant Kumar and Others v. The State of Haryana

Civil Appeal · 2026 INSC 878Decided 18 Aug 2026
Civil Appeal Nos. arising out of SLP (C) Nos. 12017-12018/2023, 7597-7600/2023, 7506-7508/2023, 8142/2023, 8004/2023, 20961-20967/2024, 19938-19941/2023 and 18809/2023 (a batch of eight connected sets of appeals)
Justice Manoj Misra · Justice Ujjal Bhuyan · Justice Atul S. Chandurkar

Background

Four officers of Haryana's Development and Panchayat Department (Pradeep Atri, Praveen Chaudhary, Pankaj Gaur and Arun Bhatia) were deputed to the state's Public Works (Buildings & Roads) Department as Sub-Divisional Officers and later absorbed there as Assistant Engineers, and were subsequently given seniority ranking above some direct recruits and promotees. Several batches of direct recruits (including writ petitioner Hemant Kumar, whose petition challenging a 2020 tentative seniority list was one of nine clubbed writ petitions) challenged this deputation, absorption and the seniority assigned to the four officers as contrary to the governing 1965 recruitment rules and tainted by political interference. The Punjab and Haryana High Court held the deputation and absorption unlawful but, taking a sympathetic view of the officers' 18 years of service, declined to remove them from the PWD cadre, only denying them the disputed seniority.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court agreed that the deputation of two of the officers was illegal and of the other two irregular, and held the absorption of all four as illegal, non est and void, since it did not comply with the 1965 Rules and lacked the special circumstances required to invoke the exception allowing such transfers. The Court held the High Court fell into "grave error" by declaring the absorption illegal yet still allowing the officers to continue in the department out of sympathy: illegality, unlike mere irregularity, cannot be cured or regularised merely because a long time has passed, as settled by the Constitution Bench in Uma Devi. Because their absorption was void, their lien in their parent department (which is extinguished only on valid permanent appointment elsewhere) never lapsed, so they were directed to be repatriated to the Development and Panchayat Department with seniority fixed immediately above those who were originally junior to them there.

Lesson Learnt

A government employee's illegal deputation or absorption into another department cannot be made lawful simply through the passage of time or out of sympathy for long service. Courts must undo an illegal appointment and restore the employee to their rightful cadre, since illegality (unlike a mere procedural irregularity) cannot be regularised.

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

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