Regularisation of sanitary workers from date of appointment:

The Madras High Court today made it clear that regularisation of sanitary workers appointed in municipalities across Tamil Nadu have to be made from the date of their initial appointment.

A full vacation bench of justices S Manikumar, S Nagamuthu and R Mahadevan passed the order on a batch of review petitions filed by the workers against the order of another full bench on November 29, 2013.

The matter relates to the appointment of sanitary workers on July 7 and November 26, 1999 and September 5, 2000 in different municipalities in the state.

A total of 204 workers were appointed following respective government orders.
 

The services of all these workers were regularised from October 31, 2006 vide government orders of May 1998 and February 2006.

The petitioners submitted that regularisation should take effect only from the date of the February 23, 2006 order by Municipal Administration and Water Supply Department, and not from the date on which they completed three years of service.

Earlier, owing to contrary views of different benches, the matter was referred to the Chief Justice, for constituting a larger bench to decide on the issue of whether an employee can claim regularisation from the date of initial appointment, in the absence of any statutory rules.

The core issue taken in the review application was whether the sanitary workers were entitled to regularisation with time scale of pay on completion of three years service.

They sought clarity on whether their regularisation should be from the date of appointment, date of completion of three years or from the date of the government order of February 23, 2006.

Earlier, the full bench of three judges had decided that the regularisation shall take effect only from the February 23, 2006 government order.

The present bench referred to a Supreme Court order that protection under Articles 14 and 16(1) of the Constitution is available even to the temporary government servant and said if the employer's action was found arbitrary or discriminatory it was liable to be invalidated.