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Smt. Imlikokla Longchar & Ors. vs The State of Nagaland & Ors.

Civil Appeal · 2022 INSC 1064Decided 11 Oct 2022
Civil Appeal No. 7166 of 2022
Dinesh Maheshwari · Aniruddha Bose

Background

The appellants (four women lecturers) and respondent No.4 ("K"), all working under the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) in Nagaland, disputed inter-se seniority in the cadre of Senior Lecturer. The appellants had started as lecturers on a contractual basis in 1992, were regularised as lecturers only around 2001-2003, and were later given temporary and then formal promotion/regularisation as Senior Lecturers, with some retroactive effect. K, by contrast, had a different, earlier service trajectory. The appellants argued that because the 2003 Rules gave them retroactive regularisation as Senior Lecturers effective from 2001/2003, their earlier officiating service should count towards seniority ahead of K; the dispute had already gone through several earlier rounds of litigation.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that merely officiating in a post does not "encadre" a person in that grade: actual birth in a cadre occurs only upon formal regularisation, and nothing in the 2003 Rules allowed the officiating period to count for this purpose. It further held that the eligibility criterion of five years' continuous service in the feeder (lecturer) grade could not be satisfied by counting the appellants' earlier contractual period, since Rules requiring "continuous service" as an eligibility condition (as opposed to a seniority-fixing device) must be strictly applied, distinguishing the precedent in Girish Kumar v. State of Maharashtra, which dealt with a different kind of rule. Since the appellants did not meet the eligibility requirement of five years' continuous feeder-grade service at the relevant time, the Court held their claim to seniority over K based on retroactive regularisation could not succeed, declined to interfere with the High Court's judgment, and dismissed the appeal.

Lesson Learnt

In government service seniority disputes, simply officiating in a higher post, even for years, does not automatically count as "continuous service" in that cadre for eligibility or seniority purposes; formal regularisation is what fixes an employee's actual entry ("birth") into a cadre, and retroactive promotion orders cannot be stretched to satisfy independent eligibility conditions like a minimum years-of-service requirement.

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

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