In India, we have millions of workers including but not limited to guest lecturers, ,pump operators, data entry assistants, special police officers who serve for decades in departments of the central government and different state governments performing functions that are not distinguishable from those of regular employees, yet these workers continue to hold the status of a “temporary” or “contractual” employee and they are perpetually denied pensions, increments, and social security benefits at par with regular employees. The state is constitutionally ordained as the model employer but has unfortunately not been able to completely uphold the ethos of the principles of equality in terms of matters of public employment as enshrined by our forefathers in the Constitution of India.
The Supreme Court's Five-Judge Constitution Bench decision in Secretary, State of Karnataka & Ors. Vs. Uma Devi (3) & Ors.[1] sought to end the "litigious employment" phenomenon by erecting a near-absolute bar against court directed regularisation of contractual or temporarily appointed employees appointed on an ad-hoc basis. After a lapse of almost two decades, a plethora of decisions such as Jaggo v. Union of India,[2] Shripal & Anr. Vs. Nagar Nigam, Ghaziabad[3] Dharam Singh & Ors. Vs. State of U.P. & Anr.[4] and Bhola Nath v. State of Jharkhand[5] signals that the Court is progressively confining Uma Devi's reach by giving benefits of regularisation to contractual employees in several cases wherein they have rendered service of a permanent nature but have still received a salary and other emoluments at rates lesser than those received by permanent employees.
Constitutional Framework
Articles 14 and 16 of the Constitution guarantee equality and equality of opportunity in public employment, a right held to be a facet of the basic structure in Kesavananda Bharati Vs. State of Kerala and Indra Sawhney Vs. Union of India. Article 309 makes detailed procedural rules the exclusive gateway to government service, supplemented by Articles 315–320 creating Public Service Commissions as independent gatekeepers. The state's power as an employer is more limited than it seems to be because it is subject to constitutional limitations and cannot be exercised arbitrarily.
Uma Devi (2006): The Watershed
The Supreme Court's unanimous Constitution Bench judgment laid down the law on five propositions: (i) All appointments made outside the constitutional scheme shall not confer any right on the appointees; (ii) The courts should not ordinarily direct absorption, regularisation, or permanent continuance; (iii) Litigious employment i.e. continuing service under an interim order shall not create an entitlement to absorption (iv) Equal pay for equal work does not imply a right to permanence; and (v) All prior judgements running contrary to these principles stand overruled. However, the judgement rightly carved out an exception holding duly qualified persons irregularly appointed to duly sanctioned vacant posts who have worked for ten or more years must be considered for regularisation by the State as a one-time measure. The judgment's genuine concern of ensuring equity for the "teeming millions" who never got to compete cannot be sacrificed for the "handful" before the court is unimpeachable.
Scope of Uma Devi
The ratio of Uma Devi is principally directed at addressing two issues: first, the phenomenon of “litigious employment” whereby a temporary appointee gets an interim order of continuation from a court and then parlays the passage of time into a claim of permanence; and second, the systematic by-passing of constitutional recruitment machinery through back-door appointments that deny equally or better-qualified candidates a fair opportunity to compete. The Constitution Bench was explicit that Articles 14 and 16, read with Article 309, reserve the right to public employment to those selected through a process that is open, transparent, and merit-based. Uma Devi therefore operates as a procedural safeguard for the millions outside the courtroom rather than as a substantive denial of rights to the workers before it.
Critically, Uma Devi does not purport to immunise the State from its own constitutional obligations as a model employer. The one-time regularisation measure carved out in paragraph 53 of the judgment acknowledges that workers who have served for ten or more years against sanctioned posts through a duly constituted selection process possess a distinct and recognisable claim. The judgment's scope is therefore limited, it forecloses judicial creation of posts and court-directed absorption of irregular appointees, but it does not license the State to exploit structural informality as a device for suppressing labour costs and evading service law obligations.
The Human Issue: Selective Application of Uma Devi and Structural Precarity
The most grievous human cost of Uma Devi has been its selective weaponisation by State employers. State governments across India have invoked the authority of Uma Devi to deny regularisation to workers who fall squarely within the paragraph 53 exception, while simultaneously declining to conduct the one-time exercise that the Constitution Bench itself mandated. The result is a perverse asymmetry: the bar against court-directed regularisation is applied rigorously and universally, while the correlative obligation of the State to regularise eligible long-serving workers is treated as discretionary and perpetually deferred. Workers such as the Special Police Officers in Nihal Singh, the Central Water Commission employees in Jaggo, and the Higher Education Commission staff in Dharam Singh illustrate a common pattern: decades of uninterrupted service performing functions integral to public administration, remuneration at a fraction of the regular pay scale, and eventual denial of all benefits on the strength of a judgment that was never meant to authorise such exploitation.
The selective application creates a two-tier constitutional world. A regularised government servant enjoys full service protections, pension, increments, and the right against arbitrary removal enshrined in Articles 310 and 311. A contractual or daily-wage worker performing identical duties receives none of these protections and may be removed without notice, retrenched without compensation, and denied even the dignity of a service record. The constitutional principle of equal pay for equal work, confirmed as a facet of Article 14 in Randhir Singh v. Union of India, has been rendered hollow for this class of workers because Uma Devi itself held that the principle does not import a right to regularisation. The human consequence is a permanent underclass within the State's own workforce: workers who are indispensable in function but invisible in rights.
The structural dimension of this problem is equally troubling. Many State governments have adopted a deliberate policy of not creating sanctioned posts for functions that are manifestly permanent in nature, precisely because the absence of posts provides a procedural shield against regularisation claims under Uma Devi. The State thus turns the constitutional safeguard on its head: it weaponises the very irregularity it has engineered. The Supreme Court in Nihal Singh rightly identified this as arbitrary and directed post-creation, yet the practice persists across departments and States because the litigation burden on individual contractual workers is prohibitively high and the institutional incentives for the State favour inaction. The result is a systemic human rights failure dressed in the language of constitutional propriety: a State that invokes the rule of law to perpetuate the very exploitation the Constitution was designed to prevent.
Post-Uma Devi: Erosion of the Absolute Bar
State of Karnataka & Ors. Vs. M.L. Kesari & Ors.[6] clarified that the para 53 one-time measure is a continuing duty — a government cannot claim the exercise is over if it conducted it incompletely or ignored eligible workers. Nihal Singh Vs. State of Punjab, held that Uma Devi cannot act as a "licence for exploitation" where the State engaged Special Police Officers for decades and then denied them the benefit of regularisation by claiming that no sanctioned posts existed, posts it had deliberately not created and the court found this arbitrary and directed creation of posts and regularisation within three months. Jaggo Vs. Union of India ordered the regularisation of four Central Water Commission employees kept as "part-time" for up to two decades on duties that were integral and perennial were ordered regularised on the ground that Uma Devi was never intended to penalise long-serving workers in irregular (as opposed to illegal) appointments performing essential public functions. Shripal v. Nagar Nigam, Ghaziabad anchored workers' rights in both constitutional and industrial law — arbitrary termination of municipal gardeners during conciliation proceedings without retrenchment compensation violated the U.P. Industrial Disputes Act and Uma Devi could not be used to justify such exploitative engagements for essentially permanent municipal duties.
Dharam Singh & Ors. v. State of U.P. represents the most direct assault on the financial-constraints defence. Class-III and Class-IV employees of the U.P. Higher Education Services Commission had served continuously since 1989–92, paid Rs. 1,500–2,000 per month, while the State refused to sanction permanent posts citing generic financial strain. The Supreme Court quashed these refusals as arbitrary and discriminatory. The Bench declared that financial constraints, to constitute a valid defence, must be reasoned, evidenced, and proportionate — not deployed as a blanket talisman.
Bhola Nath v. State of Jharkhand struck at the contractual disclaimer itself. The State renewed contracts of Junior Engineers (Agriculture) year after year for thirteen years and then declined further extension as the appointment orders contained a clause disclaiming any obligation to regularise. The Supreme Court held that repeated extensions against sanctioned posts through a due selection process give rise to a constitutionally cognisable legitimate expectation that cannot be defeated by a printed disclaimer.
Way Forward
Uma Devi has correctly diagnosed the pathology of litigious employment. However, it falls short in applying a single remedy indiscriminately to two different situations: the opportunistic backdoor entrant and the worker the State itself trapped in structural precarity. The post-Uma Devi counter-current — Nihal Singh through Bhola Nath — has now built a coherent doctrinal alternative.
The pathology Uma Devi targeted has been largely cured. The pathology it created i.e. state exploitation behind a constitutional façade does demand fresh judicial attention. Perennial work deserves perennial posts. A lion that contracts with a lamb cannot, when the lamb invokes the Constitution, rely on the terms of that contract.