After Nearly 35 Years On Daily Wages, Karnataka HC Orders Regularisation Of 10 Ballari Municipal Workers From Their 10th Year, With Pension Benefits

Respondents 1–10 were engaged by Ballari City Corporation on a daily-wage or temporary basis between 1986 and 1988 in various municipal roles.

They continued working for approximately 35 years, and the Corporation extended time scales of pay and repeatedly recommended their regularisation.

After the State rejected their claim in 2023, the respondents challenged that endorsement. A Single Judge quashed it and directed the State to consider regularisation; the State appealed.

The State argued that the respondents had not been appointed to sanctioned posts through open selection, lacked prescribed qualifications, and were ineligible under a 1990 government guideline.

Under Secretary, State of Karnataka v. Umadevi, irregular appointments of duly qualified persons who had served for ten years or more without court intervention were to be considered for regularisation as a one-time measure; State of Karnataka v. M.L. Kesari required that exception to be implemented in substance.

The Court also relied on Nihal Singh v. State of Punjab, Amarkant Rai v. State of Bihar and Narendra Kumar Tiwari v. State of Jharkhand for the principle that the State should not use the absence of sanctioned posts—particularly where their creation is within its control—to defeat claims arising from long-term service against genuine needs.

It further relied on Shiv Narayan Nagar v. State of U.P. and Jaggo v. Union of India in treating decades-long temporary engagement in perennial work as potentially exploitative, and in holding that labels such as “temporary” or “not on a sanctioned post” do not alone resolve the claim.

Article 14 prohibits arbitrary differentiation; the Court also applied the principle that the State cannot approbate and reprobate.

The Court found that the respondents had served continuously for more than three decades in regular, perennial work, and that the State had produced no material showing they were unqualified, engaged by an incompetent authority, or appointed through a backdoor process.

It therefore characterised their appointments as irregular, not illegal, and held that the State could not rely on its own failure to sanction posts to deny regularisation.

The 1990 guideline had not been enforced against the respondents: no disengagement or termination orders had been issued, and the Corporation continued to employ and pay them.

The State could not treat them as validly engaged for decades and then invoke the guideline against their regularisation claim.

The Court also held that applying the guideline’s 1 July 1984 cut-off to deny regularisation after decades lacked a rational nexus and offended Article 14.

Finding no perversity or legal error in the Single Judge’s order, the Court declined to interfere.

The State was directed to regularise respondents 1–10 from the dates on which they completed ten years of service, with consequential benefits, including pay fixation and counting of service for pension and other retiral benefits.

The exercise was to be completed within three months; for any respondent retiring before its completion, regularisation was to be granted notionally for retiral benefits.