Lost job opportunity for being ‘over aged’, man gets Rs 5 lakh relief from Orissa High Court

A bench of Justices Krishna Shripad Dixit and Chittaranjan Dash passed the order while disposing of the man’s plea.

Court’s relief

• The first contention of counsel for the petitioner that no citizen can be denied the benefit of public employment or state largesse only on the ground that he is over-aged, has to be accepted in view of declaration of law by the Apex Court in Chandra Shekhar Singh v. State of Jharkhand.
• The tribunal was not expected to gloss over the issue and therefore, as rightly submitted, this is the first error apparent on the face of the impugned order, which needs to be set at naught.
• The second submission of counsel for the petitioner that there was no change of policy guidelines, which governed the engagement of services of persons of the kind again needs to be countenanced, inasmuch as the tribunal misconstrued the document as being different from the earlier one, when they were one and the same.
• This could have been ascertained just by turning the pages of the said documents that were produced in series. Thus, the second lacunae in the impugned order is demonstrated.
• The last contention that there was no need for the services of petitioner at all and therefore, the Tribunal rightly denied relief to him again cannot be accepted because during the long drawn legal battle, as many as 31 persons of the kind have been engaged.
• Now, the relief as sought for by the petitioner cannot be granted to him because he has turned out to be overaged for employment.
• That does not mean, no relief can be granted by the court in the changed circumstances, petitioner not being responsible for all that. Time and tide wait for none, goes the saying.

Background

• The petitioner had approached the high court against the Cuttack central administrative tribunal’s order whereby the petitioner’s application was dismissed where he had challenged the denial of engagement to him on the grounds that he was over-aged and that there was change of the policy guidelines.
• The counsel for the petitioner had said that there was no change of policy guidelines and the tribunal grossly erred.
• It was argued that the tribunal blindly accepted the contention that there was no requirement of services of anyone much less the petitioner.
• The counsel drew the attention of the court to the RTI information, which his client has procured stating that pendente lite as many as 31 persons were engaged in Category-D as substitutes and therefore, submitted that the impugned order was liable to be voided.