Punjab and Haryana High Court – Conversion of Outsource Posts into Regular Posts Does Not Confer Right of Regularization on Contractual Employee

Case Name: Nitish Seth v. State of Haryana and Others

Citation: CWP No. 76 of 2020

Date of Judgment: 6 January 2020

Bench: Justice Ritu Bahri

Held: The Punjab and Haryana High Court held that the conversion of outsource posts into regular posts does not automatically regularize the services of an employee working on contractual or outsource basis. Appointment to Group B posts in the Architecture Department of the State of Haryana must be made through the Haryana Public Service Commission, and a contractual employee cannot claim a regular appointment by virtue of such conversion.

Summary: The petitioner was appointed in 2013 on a contractual basis as an Assistant Architect pursuant to an advertisement, and his service tenure was extended from time to time. Though his services were once terminated in 2016, he was permitted to continue till a regularly selected candidate joined, as per orders of the Court in earlier litigation. In 2019, the State Government converted two outsource posts of Assistant Architect into regular posts, and the petitioner claimed that since he was working against one of those posts, he should be regularized and issued an appointment letter. The respondents, however, required him to continue on a fresh contractual agreement, and did not accede to his request for regularization.

The Court observed that the petitioner had accepted his contractual engagement subject to the explicit condition that he would not claim previous service benefits and that his tenure would subsist only until the joining of a regularly recruited candidate. It emphasized that Group B posts are filled by HPSC through statutory recruitment, and conversion of posts cannot override this procedure. The petitioner’s reliance on departmental letters and representations was rejected as misconceived, since the conversion pertained to the post itself and not to the occupant.

Decision: The writ petition was dismissed as being devoid of merit. The Court upheld the State’s stand that the petitioner could not claim regular appointment merely because outsource posts were converted into regular posts, and reaffirmed that only HPSC could make appointments to such posts.