IN INDIA, PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT constitutes a huge share of litigation in courts. Service litigation is mainly centered around regularisation, back wages, gratuity, pension, inter alia.
The most important yardstick that the courts consider as a sine qua non in service law litigation is the ‘nature of employment’. Here, nature of employment means the ‘legality of employment’, which is the foremost criteria to ascertain locus standi of any petitioner in service litigation. This is because, only those lawfully employed after following due procedure are allowed to seek the recourse of law while those employed via back-door entry are proscribed from the same. In this regard, the courts refer to the judgement of Secretary, State of Karnataka and Ors. v. Umadevi and Ors. (2006) or the Uma Devi Guidelines as they are popularly known.
The 58-page Constitution Bench decision is a super detailed enunciation on public employment and its converging facets with fundamental rights and basic structures of the Constitution of India, 1950. The judgement ventures into intricacies of service law and speaks about irregularity and illegality of employment as the yardstick in ascertaining regularisation. Although, the mainstay of the judgement is to prevent backdoor entries into public posts, the state has systematically used the judgement to prevent legitimate entries as well.
This piece attempts to analyse this use and abuse of a judgment delivered almost twenty years ago which is still extremely relevant.
