Gurugram: It began with four engineers moving on deputation from Haryana’s Development and Panchayat Department to the Public Works Department (PWD). But what was meant to be a temporary stint turned into over two decades of service, with the four officers eventually absorbed into the PWD.
After years of litigation, the Supreme Court Monday quashed their absorption and effectively sent them back to the Development and Panchayat Department, which they left in 2005.
A bench of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Manoj Misra set aside a March 2023 Punjab and Haryana High Court judgement that, while calling their absorption “bad in law”, still allowed Pradeep Atri, Praveen Chaudhary, Pankaj Gaur and Arun Bhatia to continue serving as Assistant Engineers in the PWD’s Building and Roads wing.
The high court had taken what it called a “sympathetic view”, reasoning that since the four had already put in 18 years of service, they no longer had a lien on their posts in the Development and Panchayat Department, and would suffer hardship if terminated.
The Supreme Court rejected the argument.
“Illegality cannot be cured and made legal and valid by lapse of time,” the bench observed, invoking the Constitution bench ruling in the Uma Devi case on public employment.
“Illegality, which is distinct and different from irregularity, cannot be regularized by taking a sympathetic view on the ground of long continuance in service,” it added.
The four officers have now been ordered repatriated to the Development and Panchayat Department, where they will be slotted back into the Sub-Divisional Officer (Panchayati Raj) cadre, placed immediately above whoever was junior to them when they left.
The court also detailed a trail of political intervention in the case.
It said Atri’s push to move out of the Panchayat department was backed by Haryana’s revenue minister, who wrote to the PWD minister on his behalf, and the PWD minister then endorsed his absorption.
Chaudhary’s case was carried forward by both the revenue minister and the transport minister, who the court said “had nothing to do either with the Panchayat Department or the PW(B&R) Department”, before landing on the desk of the chief minister, who personally approved it in 2007.
At one point, the local MLA from the Bahadurgarh constituency also wrote to the chief minister seeking Chaudhary’s absorption against a direct-recruit vacancy, citing Atri’s case as precedent.
How it started
The dispute traces back to 2005, when Pradeep Atri, then an engineer in the Panchayat department, began lobbying to be sent on deputation to the PWD’s Building and Roads branch. He first made his case through file notings, and then through the state’s revenue minister, citing a shortage of engineers there.
He was deputed in November 2005. Praveen Chaudhary followed a similar route the next year, with two ministers pushing his case even though, as the court noted, they “had nothing to do with the working of either of the two departments”.
Pankaj Gaur and Arun Bhatia were deputed separately around the same period.
All four were subsequently absorbed permanently into the PWD as Assistant Engineers (Civil), a move direct recruits in the department challenged almost immediately.
They argued that it violated the Punjab Service of Engineers (Buildings and Roads Branch) Rules, 1965, which recognise only two modes of entry into the cadre: direct recruitment and promotion, each accounting for 50 percent of the positions. Absorption by transfer, the recruits argued, had no place in that scheme.
Nine writ petitions piled up in the Punjab and Haryana High Court over the next decade, filed alternately by direct recruits demanding repatriation of the four officers and by the officers themselves defending their postings.
The high court’s 2023 verdict declared the absorptions illegal in principle but let the officers keep their jobs, only denying them seniority over recruits appointed in 2007 and 2009.
That compromise is what the Supreme Court has now dismantled.
‘Illegal’ versus ‘irregular’
The judgment draws a sharper line than the High Court did.
Writing for the bench, Justice Bhuyan held that the deputations of Atri and Chaudhary were outright “illegal”, pointing to how their transfers were engineered through political lobbying and manufactured vacancy claims rather than any genuine departmental requirement.
The court noted that Atri had even been absorbed against a vacancy reserved for direct recruits, something the 1965 Rules do not permit.
The deputations of Gaur and Bhatia, by contrast, were held to be merely “irregular” rather than illegal, a distinction that still could not save their absorption, which the court declared “illegal, non est and void” for all four officers alike.
With the absorptions quashed, the court said it did not need to go into the separate question of how their seniority should have been fixed under Rule 12(5) of the 1965 Rules — the very question the high court had spent much of its 2023 judgment wrestling with.
What happens now
The appeals before the Supreme Court included cross-petitions from the direct recruits, the four officers and the Haryana government, as well as a separate appeal arising out of a contempt petition the direct recruits filed after the high court verdict. The high court had dismissed that on the ground that the matter was already pending before the Supreme Court.
With Monday’s order, the multiple appeals converged into a single outcome: the four officers go back to the Panchayat department, and the PWD’s Assistant Engineer cadre reverts to its original order, undoing the deputations that had triggered 15 years of litigation.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)