Shimla, July 3
The Himachal Pradesh high court passed an order recently against the state and forest department protecting the rights of regulations of an employee which was delayed for eight years.
Himachal Pradesh High Court directed state respondents to confer regular service status to a petitioner, Rashid Mohammed, who had completed the requisite 240 days of daily wage service.
The division bench comprising Justice Vivek Singh Thakur and Justice Ranjan Sharma decreed that the petitioner’s service should be regularized from April 1, 2009, the date he was initially eligible, and failure to comply would result in a 5% interest penalty on the pending dues to be levied on the responsible officers.
In 22 page order passed by court recently copy of which supplied today said that petioner Rashid Mohammed had filed a petition seeking regularization of his service from 2009, arguing that he had completed eight years of continuous service by 2001, with the necessary 240 days each year.
According to state policy, this made him eligible for regularization by March 31, 2009. However, due to a lack of vacancies, he was only regularized on June 12, 2017, and joined the next day.
The court noted that even though the petition did not explicitly request work charge status, the broader prayer for regularization covered it, as it was incidental to the proceedings.
The respondents argued, citing previous judgments, that the forest department, where the petitioner worked, did not have a work charge establishment and thus could not confer such status.
The court, however, rejected this argument, referencing the Supreme Court’s decisions and earlier judgments of the Himachal Pradesh High Court, which clarified that the existence of a work charge establishment was not a prerequisite for conferring such status.
Specifically, the court highlighted that the state’s 1994 scheme for granting work-charged status applied universally across departments, regardless of whether they traditionally maintained such establishments.
Ultimately, the court concluded that the petitioner was entitled to regularization and work charge status from the date he initially met the eligibility criteria.
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