High Court: Contract Service Counted for Annual Increment and Pension Benefits

The Himachal Pradesh High Court has made an important arrangement regarding the counting of service benefits for temporary appointments. The court has ordered that contract service should be considered for annual increment and pension benefits. The court clarified that the extension of service benefits for temporary appointments applies equally to similar temporary appointments with different designations. The decision was delivered by Justice Vivek Singh Thakur and Justice Bipin Chandra Negi of the bench.

The court commented on the government’s practices, stating that the state should treat itself as an ideal employer, avoiding the creation of exploitative policies for employees and aiming to prevent the formulation, adoption, and practice of exploitative policies that deny valid benefits to state employees, despite repeated observations and orders from the court.

The state’s practice of renaming posts and schemes to continue the tradition of temporary appointments aims to deprive employees of valid benefits. The court mentioned that the state’s practice of appointing substitute teachers, contract teachers, para-teachers, and others with clever nomenclature, rather than as regular employees, attempts to evade benefits granted to regular employees.

Two petitioners initially worked as Junior Basic Teachers (JBT) on a contractual basis. Later, they were appointed as Shastri (a higher designation) on a regular basis. Another petitioner was initially appointed as JBT on a contractual basis, then as Shastri, and later, after the appointment of a regular teacher, she was regularized on the same post. The court stated that when an employee has rendered services on different posts on a contractual basis and is subsequently appointed as a regular employee on any post, only the length of service for the purpose of pension would be counted.

For those contractual employees who are later appointed as regular employees on the same post without any interruption, their contract service should be counted for the purpose of annual increment along with pension benefits. The court had given the order to provide actual consequential financial benefits three years ago when the petition was filed, and has now ordered the enhancement of benefits for the last three years based on fictional basis.