Recently, Tamil Nadu's newly elected Chief Minister personally handed out thirty one appointment orders to government service. The appointees had lost a family member in the stampede at the election rally in Karur in September 2025, a tragedy that killed 41 people. Rally was organised by the Chief Minister's Party.

On its face, it was an act of grace. The State stepping in to help families who suffered an unimaginable loss. But in about three week, the Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court set aside this act of charity.

There is a popular belief that when someone dies, in a public tragedy or while in government service, their family is entitled to a government job. That belief is not just legally shaky. It is totally uncalled for. But Deaths consequent to Police Firing^[1], Lockup violence^[2], stampede^[3], riots^[4], environmental tragedies^[5], has lead to compassionate appointments in our country. Sometimes even murder^[6], evidently criminal offence by someone, lead to compassionate appointment. It is usually misunderstood that public employment is a resource available for Government to compensate victims of tragedies. The judgment in question reiterates that this is a misconception.

The importance of Karur Judgment

The Karur stampede was a genuine tragedy. A crowd turned fatal at a political rally. It is normally not blamed on the State, though it must be. It is failure of machinery to properly manage the crowd, which unfortunately is the case with every public gathering in our country^[7]. An ex-gratia payment of Rs. 10,00,000/- was granted to the families by the then regime.

Elections came. The political regime changed. The new government, led by the party whose rally caused the stampede, announced that one member each of the bereaved families would get a government job! A lawyer from Madurai challenged this in the High Court.

The government's defence, bereft of the technical objections, was that being an unparalleled tragedy, these families were a class apart, deserving of affirmative, humane response. Treating this as ordinary politics was unfair to the grieving, it was argued. Earlier instances where compassionate appointments were extended to victims of tragedies^[8] were also pointed out.

The Tragedy was undisputed. What is questioned was the solution. A government job, is not the State's to give away as comfort. It is a public resource. Every citizen with the right qualifications has an equal constitutional claim to compete for it. Handing jobs outside the normal process meant that many other candidates, some of who themselves lost a parent in government service years ago and were still waiting their turn on an existing compassionate appointment list, were pushed further back in the queue for no reason connected to their own merit or need. Court held that the grant of appointment was illegal.

But buried in the judgment, a genuinely constructive idea that deserves more attention is germane.

“We also wonder why the Government should not have extended training in skills and entrepreneurship on various aspects for deserving members of the families of those who died in tragedies like this. The Government would be creating leaders. The Government would be creating entrepreneurs. The Government would be creating self-sufficient individuals in each family, who would later on provide employment to others. The Government can bear their expenses towards such a technical courses or skilled courses for the members of those who die and that would be a far, far better thing to have been resorted to and to have been done, rather than giving public employment as Office Assistants”.

This suggestion ought to receive consideration at the level of policy makers.

The Popular Misconception and Judicial Circumspection

The system of giving appointment to public services based on compassion to a family who lost a member while in public employment is not widely followed in the world. This method of showing compassion, to my understanding, is unique to India and Pakistan. How such a scheme came to be embedded in the Public Employment Law of these two countries is unclear.

Quaintly, the schemes of compassionate appointments does not restrict itself to families of persons dying in public employment also. As already pointed out it is used as a measure to bring solace to tragedies which appeals to public sentiments also. Sometimes we see a schemes which provide employment to the persons whose land is acquired for some public purpose. In an even stranger case, when arrack was banned in Kerala, there was a scheme to give compassionate appointment to those who lost their job in the Government Corporations. A gargantuan share of 50% vacancies was fixed as the quota for such appointments. This enhanced quota is under challenge in various litigations.

These circumstances have led to a popular misconception. It has become part of popular imagination that a job is assured if someone dies in harness. There is also a misunderstanding from many quarter that a tragedy must be compensated by Government Job. The claim is usually made as if it is too obvious to substantiate.

But the Law speaks differently. The Supreme Court settled the point as far back as 1994, in a case called Umesh Kumar Nagpal v. State of Haryana^[9]. Not the fact of death itself; not the manner of death, however tragic; Not sympathy, however genuine gives rise to the claim. Just one narrow question justify appointment on compassionate grounds. Has the family actually been plunged into penury by the sudden loss of its only earning member, with nothing else standing between them and destitution?

Every precedent that has followed since has only tightened the test rather than loosened it. It is repeatedly held that compassionate appointment is "not a bonanza", not a “back door into government service”. As Supreme Court poetically puts it, judges and tribunals "are not supposed to carry Santa Claus's big bag on Christmas eve”.

In February 2025, the Supreme Court, in Canara Bank v. Ajithkumar G.K.^[10], gathered together twenty-six principles that four decades of scattered case law had produced. Broadly stated, it is now trite that compassionate appointment is strictly rule-bound exception to open recruitment. It is not a right, much less an inheritance. It is justified for only two situations, death in harness or permanent incapacitation. It can be used only to answer genuine indigence, tested against pension, terminal benefits, and any other income the family has. A mere fall in comfort is not an acceptable trigger for preference in public employment. A claim delayed is a claim weakened. The law presumes that a family which does not ask for help quickly did not need it urgently. At times, even when the claim is not accepted for long, the survival of the family for long without such benefit is read as lack of indigence. A family that clears every one of these hurdles must still separately meet ordinary suitability and age requirements before a job actually follows. For every grieving family that asks for a job, there are countless other families every bit as poor which do not get any preference.

As can be seen, inconsistent with the popular understanding, the court has been extremely strict in understanding the scheme of compassionate appointment. If all the principles are applied, more often than not, compassionate appointment will be denied.

A shaky abode of compassion

Even the narrow, hardship-tested version of compassionate appointment, sits uneasily next to two constitutional mandates. Article 14, which guarantees equality before the law and Article 16, which guarantees equal opportunity in public employment.

Public Employment is not an unlimited resource. Every single post that goes to one candidate is a post that another eligible citizen can no longer compete for. This is true whether the post is handed out for political reasons, or under the most carefully audited, means-tested compassionate appointment schemes.

Pubic Employment is not a poverty alleviation programme either. Efficiency, tested through merit at time of appointment in public services, is a necessity for the society. Any tinkering of the same has a public interest impact also.

The remedy the court finds to this malady is to read the schemes down and to keep it in strict check. The motive is to address indigence rather than to descent or sympathy. But motive is not the same thing as effect. However pure the motive, the effect of every compassionate appointment is identical to any other form of preference. One gets a public job that an open, merit-based process would otherwise have offered to, hopefully, the best-qualified applicant. If compassion for a grieving family is a value the State wishes to honour, and it should be, that must be honoured without taking away, from someone else entirely blameless, their equal chance at a public post.

Another issue is the perception the facility of compassionate appointment creates. Once a benefit like this exists for long, it stops being seen as an exceptional concession. It is then treated as an ordinary condition of service. For instance when the Kerala Government revised its compassionate appointment scheme's eligibility norms in March 2025, tightening an age condition and an income ceiling, government employee unions reacted as though an inviolable right had been taken away. They did not see it as an exceptional benefit being narrowed. A scheme meant to be a rare and narrow safety net for genuine crisis, once entrenched, becomes politically almost impossible to reform, albeit there is sound constitutional case for reforming it.

A different route

None of this is an argument for abandoning bereaved families to their fate. Government must help them in a way that does not require taking a public employment away from someone else, both as an aspirant for a public employment, and as a member of public aspiring an efficient pubic servant.

The most honest and constitutionally sound answer is a guaranteed, generous, monetary substitute. Experiences in foreign jurisdictions justify this. It is understood that the schemes for compassionate appointment to public service is something restricted only to India and Pakistan. In other countries, developed and otherwise, the solace to the bereaved family is a handsome monetary compensation.

On the death of an employee in service, which leads to indigence for the family, the family should receive, as of right (without having to fight through years of litigation) a continuing payment set at a substantial share of the salary the employee would have drawn. A safe calculation would be roughly two thirds of it, going by the standards seen followed in Motor Accident Claims. Let this be continuing until the date the employee would have retired, or until the youngest dependent child reaches an age of independence, whichever comes first. This is, if anything, a faster and more reliable. Sudden indigence would be certainly addressed.

Because this kind of relief does not compete with any other citizen's constitutional right to seek public employment, there is no principled reason to cap it at 5% of vacancies, or at any percentage at all. It should be available to every family that genuinely needs it. It need not be rationed by an arbitrary annual ceiling that leaves deserving families waiting years for a vacancy, or being totally refused relief.

The economics is not too sloppy for the Government either. In case of a government servant who dies in harness, usually family pension equal to the normal pension is paid. This would be approximately 50% of the pay last drawn. Thus, the increase on monthly payment will be about 16% of the pay of the deceased employee. When compared to a full appointment, it actually will be lesser expensive for the Government.

The Madras High Court's own suggestion to fund serious skills training and support for entrepreneurship for members of the bereaved family in the Karur case points toward another phase of the solution. Instead of, or alongside, income support, the State should consider the adoption of children for education, based on their merit and need. This will be a great solace to the family. Done well, this builds something that no government job at the lowest rung of the ladder can. A family's own, independent capacity to earn. In time, perhaps, they will even employ others. Leaders will be created. It treats the family as capable adults with a future to build, not as recipients of a single, one-time favour. An effort from the Government to equip the families in need by equipping its younger members educationally, vocationally and professionally would go a long way in not only salvaging the family in distress, but also in creating a stronger society.

The question of bartering public employment for any kind of misfortune must not arise. The fundamental right to equality of opportunity of no citizen must be compromised on the specious ground of compassion towards bereaved families.

Death should not buy a government job. The Karur judgment is a useful, timely reminder of exactly how narrow that exception is meant to be, and how quickly it turns into something else, political theatre, unequal treatment, a queue-jump for the unlucky families whose tragedy happened to make the news, the moment a government tries to stretch it beyond its proper limits.

But the deeper point is that even the narrow, honestly administered version of such scheme asks a question which is unanswerable in the context of Constitution. Can one family's grief justify taking a public job away from another family's equally qualified, equally deserving candidate? The better answer, is to stop asking that question altogether. To answer a grieving family's real and urgent need nothing need to be taken from anyone else. Money, generously and promptly given, backed by real investment in the family's own capacity to stand on its feet reflects actual compassion, tempered with respect to the one who receives it.

1. Thoothukudi (Sterlite) police firing, 2018 ↑

2. Sathankulam custodial deaths, 2020 ↑

3. Tirupati stampede, January 2025 ↑

4. 1984 anti-Sikh riots ↑

5. Bhopal Gas Tragedy, 1984 ↑

6. Leelavathi murder, 1997 ↑

7. Hariraj M.R., “Administrative Indifference to Mass Gatherings”, 2025(1)KLT (J) 15. ↑

8. See Supra n. 1,2, and 6, all from Tamil Nadu ↑

9. (1994) 4 SCC 138 ↑

10. Canara Bank v. Ajithkumar G.K., AIR 2025 SC 1232: 2025 INSC 184 ↑

    Author is a Senior Advocate practicing at High Court of Kerala. Views are personal. Views are personal.