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The State of Nagaland vs. Nishevi Achumi

Civil Appeal · 2022 INSC 695Decided 11 Jul 2022
Civil Appeal No. 4223 of 2022
M.R. Shah · B.V. Nagarathna

Background

The respondent's husband worked as a "work-charge" (daily-wage/contract-type) government employee in Nagaland and died in service in 2005 without ever having claimed regularization of his job during his lifetime. Twelve years later, in 2017, his widow filed a writ petition seeking retrospective regularization of his services (from one day before his death) so that she could claim family pension. The Single Judge and, on appeal, a Division Bench of the Gauhati High Court both ruled in her favour and directed the State to regularize his services. The State appealed to the Supreme Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court noted that under the applicable regularization policy, work-charge employees were to be regularized strictly by seniority as and when vacancies arose, and that the deceased employee was far below in the seniority list: employees senior to him were only regularized in 2009, years after his death. Since his own turn for regularization had never actually come during his lifetime, there was no basis to treat him as entitled to regularization retroactively. The Court held that both the High Court's Single Judge and Division Bench had committed a grave error in directing regularization one day before his death, since this bypassed the seniority-based scheme entirely. It allowed the State's appeal, quashed both High Court orders, and dismissed the widow's original writ petition.

Lesson Learnt

Courts cannot direct retrospective regularization of a deceased employee's service, and the resulting pension benefits, if the employee was never actually eligible for regularization under the seniority-based scheme during his lifetime: sympathy for a claimant cannot override a settled service policy.

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

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