Delayed Appointment Due to Unsubstantiated Handwriting Mismatch Entitles Employee to Notional Seniority and Pay Fixation

The 35 applicants applied for Group-D posts under employment notification No. 220/open MKT/RRC 2013 dated 30.12.2013

While they cleared the written and physical tests, the respondents delayed their appointments because a handwriting expert opined that their signatures/handwriting on documents mismatched

After multiple rounds of litigation (O.As), the Tribunal previously ruled in favor of the applicants, leads to their eventual appointment 8–9 years later

The applicants filed this O.A. seeking retrospective seniority and notional benefits from 2015, the year their batch-mates and juniors were originally appointed

The respondents contested this, citing Railway Board Master Circular 34, which stipulates that seniority is generally reckoned from the date of actual appointment

1. Whether the applicants are entitled to seniority and notional pay fixation from the date their juniors/batch-mates joined service in 2015, despite their own delayed appointment due to verification disputes

General Principles of Seniority under Master Circular 34 Para-2, which dictates that seniority is typically governed by the date of appointment

Principle of parity and judicial precedents from the Delhi High Court and the Tribunal’s Principal Bench, specifically Krishan Kumar v. Union of India (O.A. No. 109/2016)

Sachin v. Union of India (W.P. (C) 10076/2016)

Vijay Kumar v. Union of India (W.P. (C) 7623/2019)

Where an appointment is delayed without fault of the candidate—such as due to unsubstantiated allegations of handwriting mismatch—the candidate is entitled to notional seniority from the date their batch-mates were appointed

The Tribunal noted that the applicants’ appointments were delayed by nearly a decade due to handwriting verification issues which were eventually resolved in their favor through prior litigation

The court rejected the respondents' argument that seniority must start only from the actual date of joining, finding that the delay was not attributable to any fault of the applicants

Applying the reasoning from the Delhi High Court in Sachin v. Union of India, the Tribunal observed that when a candidate is cleared of doubts regarding their identity or signatures, they must be granted seniority at par with similarly placed persons from the same selection process

Since the respondents could not dispute that the applicants' case was identical to the aforementioned precedents, the Tribunal held that a different view could not be taken

The court directed the respondents to grant the applicants seniority from the date their similarly placed counterparts were appointed in 2015

The court ordered that the applicants be granted all consequential benefits including notional pay fixation from that date, though it explicitly denied the grant of back wages for the period they were out of service