Supreme Court allows quota in promotion of SC/ST employees
5 June 2018: The Supreme Court allowed the Centre to provide reservation in promotion for SC/ST employees as per law until the issue has been adjudicated by its Constitution Bench.
The Central Government told the bench that it was bound to provide promotion to its employees, and that promotions have virtually come to a standstill since the orders of the high courts of Delhi, Bombay and Punjab and Haryana and the apex court had also passed different orders on appeals filed against those judgements. The Centre’s challenge is to the Delhi High Court order of 23 August 2017 quashing government’s order extending reservation in promotion to SC/ST employees beyond five years from 16 November 1992.
Punjab and Haryana HC sets aside regularisation orders of the Haryana Government
4 June 2018: Punjab and Haryana High Court last week set aside four orders by which the government of former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda had regularised the services of contract and ad hoc staff before the state election. Both the HCs based their orders on the Supreme Court’s famous Umadevi verdict of 2006, which laid down the framework for dealing with irregular appointments by the state that ruled that daily wage/ temporary/contractual employees had no inherent right to be absorbed in service. However, the court gave a one-time relaxation to governments to frame a policy for regularisation of “duly qualified persons in duly sanctioned vacant posts (who)… have continued to work for 10 years or more”, and directed that this “process
must be set in motion within six months from this date” (10 April 2006).
The striking down of the four regularisation orders will impact at least 4,654 individuals as per lists compiled by the state government. The court has given the government six months to act on the order. The state is likely to appeal in the Supreme Court; it also has the option to pass an ordinance making these ad hoc/contract staff permanent employees.
Haryana framed its one-time policy on 29 July 2011, for Group B, C and D employees but again issued four more policies in June-July 2014, citing “humanitarian grounds”.
