Mahesh Chandra Verma v. The State of Jharkhand & Ors.
Background
The appellants were Judicial Officers initially appointed to temporary "Fast Track Courts" set up (under Supreme Court directions in Brij Mohan Lal v. Union of India) to clear case backlogs in Jharkhand, and after nearly a decade of service were later absorbed into the regular Higher Judicial Service through a special examination process mandated by the Supreme Court. The State of Jharkhand treated them as fresh recruits for pension purposes, refusing to count their years of Fast Track Court service toward their pensionary and retiral benefits. Their writ petitions challenging this were dismissed by the Jharkhand High Court, which reasoned that it could not grant anything beyond what the Supreme Court itself had ordered under Article 142.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that nothing in its earlier judgments (Brij Mohan Lal or Mahesh Chandra Verma's own prior round) had prohibited counting Fast Track Court service for pension purposes: the High Court had wrongly read a prohibition into silence. The Court noted the appellants were appointed to these courts strictly on merit (from the same selection process as the regular cadre, just not high enough on the list at the time), served for about a decade to the satisfaction of the judicial system, and that the State's own failure to create sufficient regular cadre posts, not any fault of the appellants, necessitated the Fast Track Court scheme in the first place. Drawing an analogy to a prior ruling on regularising Special Police Officers in Punjab, the Court held it would be unjust to let the State's own staffing shortfall be used as a reason to deny these officers credit for years of genuine judicial service.
Lesson Learnt
When the government itself creates a stop-gap employment scheme because it has failed to sanction enough regular posts, it cannot later penalize the employees who filled that gap by denying them service credit: years of bona fide work performed to fill a government-created need must count toward pension and retiral benefits upon regularisation.