The Madhya Pradesh High Court has held that the period of ad-hoc service rendered by a government college Physics lecturer between 1977 and 1987 must be counted as qualifying service for pension, despite short breaks of two to three days that occurred during that period. The Court directed the State authorities to treat the lecturer’s service as continuous and to revise his pension accordingly. The petitioner had been appointed as an ad-hoc lecturer at a Government College in District Sagar and continued in that capacity for ten years before being regularised. He eventually retired in 2009 as a professor. When he applied for pension in 2020, the authorities rejected his claim, stating that the breaks in his ad-hoc service disqualified the period from being counted for pensionary benefits.
Challenging this decision, the petitioner argued that the breaks in service were purely artificial and created by the employer as part of an administrative practice common during that period. He submitted that these short interruptions could not be treated as actual discontinuity, especially because the ad-hoc appointment had been against a regular, sanctioned post and his subsequent regularisation had effectively acknowledged the entire stretch of ad-hoc service. He relied on Rule 15-A of the Madhya Pradesh Civil Services (Pension) Rules, 1976, which allows past ad-hoc service to be counted for pension if the service was followed by regularisation without genuine interruption.
The High Court examined the nature of the breaks and held that they did not constitute real interruptions in service. It observed that the repeated gaps of two or three days did not indicate a cessation of employment but instead reflected a practice once widely followed in ad-hoc appointments. The Court noted that when an employee has been regularised after long ad-hoc service, the earlier period cannot later be disregarded for pension purposes on the basis of nominal or mechanical breaks. The Court cited settled legal principles recognising that fictional breaks do not deprive an employee of legitimate service benefits.
The State had argued that the 2020 amendment to Rule 15-A limited the period of ad-hoc service that could be counted for pension and that only the stretch immediately preceding regularisation should be considered. The High Court rejected this argument, holding that the amendment was not retrospective and therefore had no bearing on an employee who retired in 2009. As a result, the unamended rule applied and supported the petitioner’s claim for counting the entire ad-hoc period from 1977 to 1987.
Having found that the rejection order suffered from legal error, the Court quashed the decision of the authorities and directed them to compute the petitioner’s pension by including his full ad-hoc service. The judgment ensures that employees who served for long durations on ad-hoc basis, later regularised, are not deprived of pensionary benefits because of short, artificially created breaks in service.
0 Comments
Thank you for your response. It will help us to improve in the future.