While asserting that the pension is not a bounty and is earned by the employee by dint of his long service, the Allahabad High Court (Lucknow Bench) ruled that the action of the State in excluding the service rendered by an employee on the work-charged establishment or daily wager from Section 2 of the Uttar Pradesh Qualifying Service for Pension and Validation Act, 2021, is hit by Article 14 of the Constitution of India. The Court added that such employees who were initially engaged in service as temporary or on a work-charge basis and superannuated after decades of such service without regularisation, would also be entitled to pension and pensionary benefits.
Reference was made to the various settled decisions of the Apex Court, which have held that the exclusion of service rendered by an employee on the work-charged establishment from the regular service would amount to treating equals as unequal.
Further, the Court clarified that there is no rationale in excluding the service of an employee as work-charged or daily-wager from regular service for determining the qualifying service for pension whereas the period of service rendered by an employee as temporary or permanent post is liable to be counted for the purpose of qualifying service when the nature of duties performed by a person appointed as daily wager or on work-charged establishment or temporary or permanent post are similar and identical.
The ruling came regarding the very concept of work-charged employment that has been misused by offering employment on exploitative terms for work that is regular and perennial in nature, even when there was a provision in place to count service spent on work-charge, contingencies or non-pensionable service for purposes of being counted as qualifying service for pensionary benefits.
A Single Judge Bench of Justice Manish Mathur referred to Section 2 of the Uttar Pradesh Qualifying Service for Pension and Validation Act, 2021, which commences with a non-obstante clause and prescribes that ‘qualifying service’ would mean services rendered by an officer appointed on a temporary or permanent post in accordance with provisions of Service Rules prescribed by the Government on the said post.
The Single Judge observed that the State cannot by its arbitrary action put the employee working on work-charge establishment or daily wager to disadvantage by taking work of perpetual nature from such employee on low wages for years and excluding the period of service rendered by such employee under work-charge establishment or as daily-wager from regular service for counting qualifying service for pension when the nature of duties performed by such employees are akin and similar to the nature of duties performed by the employee appointed on a temporary and permanent post in accordance with the provisions of service rules framed by the State Government and their services are liable to be counted for determining qualifying service.
The Bench clarified that the services rendered even before regularisation in the capacity of work-charged employees, contingency paid fund employees or non-pensionable establishment shall also be counted towards the qualifying service even if such service is not preceded by temporary or regular appointment in a pensionable establishment.
not be proper to regulate them for consideration of regularisation, as others have been regularised. The Bench accordingly directed that their services be treated as a regular one, and they shall be entitled to receive the pension as if they had retired from the regular establishment, and the services rendered by them right from the day they entered the work-charged establishment shall be counted as qualifying service for the purpose of pension.
Briefly, the petitioners were initially engaged either on a daily wage or on a work-charge basis from the year 1974 onwards, and a majority of them were regularised in service after having spent more than 2-3 decades on such a basis before their regularisation. However, in a few cases, petitioners were not regularised and attained the age of superannuation.
Thus, the petitions has been filed challenging various orders whereby pensionary benefits have been denied to petitioners on the ground that their initial entry into service was either on daily wage or on work-charge basis, and they are therefore not entitled for such pensionary benefits either because they have not completed the requisite qualifying service for pensionary benefits or have been regularized in service after the cut-off date of 1st April, 2005 and are therefore covered under New Pension Scheme.
Cases Distinguished:
Rana Pratap Singh v. State of U.P. [(1995) 1 ACJ 200]
Namo Narayan Rai and others vs State of U.P. [Writ Petition No. 13626 (SS) of 2017]
Appearances:
Advocates Saryu Prasad Tiwari, Prince Kumar Pandey, Ritika Singh, Tushar Mittal, P.K. Mishra, Rakesh Pratap Singh, Arvind Kumar Jauhari, Akash Chandra Jauhari, Anand Narayan Singh, Amit Pandey, Amit Dwivedi, Jitendra Kumar Pandey, Ankit Pandey, Neerav Chitravanshi, Ram Ji Trivedi, Shraddha Tripathi, Mahesh Chandra Shukla, Kunj Bihari Pandey, Abhishek Kumar Pandey,, Pankaj Kumar Singh, Avnish Kumar Singh, Anshuman Singh Rathore, Devendra Pratap, Saad Husain, Shashank Shekhar Singh, Shamshad Ahmad Khan, Salik Ram Yadav, Abhinandan Kumar Pandey, Vimlesh Tiwari, Anurag Tripathi, Anand Mani Tripathi, Vimal Kumar Awasthi, Akhilesh Pratap Singh, Prabhat Gupta, Sanjay Kumar Verma, Saryu Prasad Tiwari, Anurag S. Kaalesh, Ramesh Kumar Srivastava, Santosh Kumar Gupta, Anamika Singh, Paritosh Shukla, Devendra Pratap, Shashank Shekhar Singh, M.P. Raju, Surendra Singh, Brijendra Kumar Verma, Mahesh Chandra Shukla, Varun Pratap Singh, Savita Jain, Rohit Tripathi, Nida Navi, Shishir Srivastava, Syed Zulfiqar Husain Naqvi, Birendra Kumar Yadav, Balram Yadav, Satendra Jaiswal, S.P. Singh Somvanshi, Shivam Sharma, Ram Karan, Vinay Kumar Mishra, Santosh Kr. Yadav Warsi, Rita Yadav, Rati Yadav, Panna Lal Gupta, Rakesh Pratap Singh, Rama Shanker, Raj Kumar Dwivedi, Nand Kishore, Sunita Srivastava, Ranjana Srivastava, Moni Yadav, Raghvendra Kumar Singh, Ram Prasad Dwivedi, Manendra Nath Rai, Satish Chandra Sitapuri, Khaleeq Ahmad Khan, Mohd. Muballi Gussalam, Mohd. Ateeq Khan, Ram Raj Ojha, Rama Kant Dixit, Anurag Srivastava, Brijesh Kumar Mishra, I.M. Pandey, Rajendra Kumar Dubey, Ravi Shanker Somvanshi, Ram Bali Tiwari, Ravi Shanker Singh, Rajeev Singh, Piyush Mishra, Vinay Prakash Tiwari, Sameer Kalia, and Srideep Chatterjee, for the Petitioner
CSC Shailender Kumar Singh, along with Advocates Vivek Shukla and Sandeep Sharma, for the Respondent
