Senior similarly situated casual labourers must receive temporary status from the date granted to their juniors.

The six applicants were casual labourers engaged in the Customs House, Tuticorin—Applicants 1 to 3 in 1993 and Applicants 4 to 6 in 1994—and claimed continuous service for over two decades. Thirteen employees junior to the applicants had been granted Temporary Status with effect from 3 February 2000 pursuant to proceedings in OA No. 1211/1999.

The applicants thereafter pursued similar relief in earlier proceedings. In OA Nos. 372 and 502 of 2009, the Tribunal set aside the rejection of their claims and directed the respondents to confer Temporary Status upon them on the same terms as their juniors; that order was upheld by the Madras High Court in W.P. Nos. 21485 and 21486 of 2010. The respondents subsequently conferred Temporary Status prospectively from 25 May 2011, but not from 3 February 2000. Following a direction in OA No. 1705/2016 to consider their representations, the fourth respondent rejected their claim for retrospective conferment by order dated 11 January 2017. The applicants challenged that rejection in the present OA.

Whether the applicants, having been found entitled to Temporary Status on parity with their junior casual labourers, were entitled to such status with retrospective effect from 3 February 2000, the date on which their juniors received the benefit.

Whether the respondents could restrict the conferment of Temporary Status to a prospective date despite the earlier Tribunal order, upheld by the High Court, directing similar treatment to the applicants.

Whether the applicants’ claim was barred by limitation or constituted an impermissible attempt to enlarge the relief granted in the earlier proceedings.

The Tribunal applied the constitutional guarantees of equality and non-discrimination under Articles 14 and 16, holding that similarly situated employees—particularly senior employees—should not be denied a benefit granted to their juniors.

It relied on the earlier Tribunal order dated 6 July 2010 and the Madras High Court judgment dated 21 September 2010, which established the applicants’ entitlement to Temporary Status on the same terms as the junior employees. The Tribunal further relied on Raman Kumar v. Union of India, which treated selective regularisation of similarly situated employees as discriminatory and violative of Article 14, and Pawan Kumar v. Union of India, 2026 INSC 156, which emphasised that long-serving employees performing perennial and necessary governmental work should not be denied equitable service benefits merely because of the initial temporary label of their engagement.

The respondents’ limitation objections under Section 21 of the Administrative Tribunals Act, 1985, and their reliance on C. Jacob, Union of India v. M.K. Sarkar, D.C.S. Negi, and Union of India v. Tarsem Singh were not accepted.

The Tribunal treated the applicants’ entitlement to parity as having already been adjudicated in the earlier proceedings. The decisive factual circumstance was that the applicants were senior to, and similarly situated with, the thirteen casual labourers who had received Temporary Status from 3 February 2000.

The earlier Tribunal order had granted relief specifically because the juniors had received the benefit, and the High Court had affirmed that reasoning. Consequently, conferring Temporary Status only from 25 May 2011 placed the applicants at a disadvantage and defeated the substance of the earlier direction to treat them on the same footing as their juniors. Applying the equality principle and the decisions in Raman Kumar and Pawan Kumar, the Tribunal held that the respondents could not adopt a restrictive interpretation of the earlier orders to deny retrospective parity.

Although the respondents argued that the claim was delayed and that retrospective relief had not been expressly sought or granted earlier, the Tribunal found that the applicants’ claim for equal treatment flowed from the already-established entitlement to parity.

However, the applicants were denied arrears of wages, back wages, and other monetary emoluments for the period from 3 February 2000 to 25 May 2011, since they had already been paid the wages applicable to them during that period. The retrospective Temporary Status was to be reckoned for consequential service benefits, including pensionary and other retiral benefits, in accordance with the applicable rules. There was no order as to costs.