The Supreme Court has said that a daily wage worker cannot be regularised if his appointment has not been made by the competent authority against a sanctioned post.
A bench of Justices S Ravindra Bhat and Sudhanshu Dhulia dismissed an appeal filed by a daily wager, Vibhuti Shankar Pandey against an order by the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s division bench of February 13, 2020.
The division bench had set aside the single bench’s direction for regularising the services of Pandey as supervisor in the water resources department of the state government.
The appellant, who was engaged in 1980 as a supervisor, on a daily rated basis, under a project, sought regularisation on the post. The minimum qualification for the post was matriculation in mathematics; a qualification that the appellant did not possess.
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However, the qualifications were relaxed on December 31, 2010. His claim was, however, rejected for the reasons that though the minimum qualifications of matriculation with mathematics will not come in the way of his regularisation, the fact remains that he was never appointed against any post.
Moreover, his appointment was never made by the competent authority and there were no posts available at the time for regularisation, the court noted.
The appellant, for his part, claimed persons who were junior to him as daily wagers were regularised in the year 1990 or even before.
The court, however, referred to the 2006 judgement in ‘Secretary, State of Karnataka and Ors Vs Umadevi and Ors’ to hold that the division bench rightly held that the single judge has not followed the principle of law as initial appointment must be done by the competent authority and there must be a sanctioned post on which the daily rated employee must be working.
‘These two conditions were clearly missing in the case of the present appellant. The division bench of the HC, therefore, has to our mind rightly allowed the appeal and set aside the order dated June 27, 2019,’ the bench said.
Source: dailyhunt
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