New Delhi: The Supreme Court of India delivered a landmark verdict on April 16, 2026, providing significant relief to thousands of contractual employees in Haryana who were absorbed into regular service under the state’s 2014 Regularisation Policy. A Bench comprising Justice P.S. Narasimha and Justice Atul S. Chandurkar declared the notifications dated June 16, 2014, and June 18, 2014, as legally valid. This decision effectively sets aside a 2018 Punjab and Haryana High Court judgment that had previously quashed these policies, threatening the job security of a large workforce.
The court’s ruling specifically protects the services of those employees regularised under the validated notifications, which focused on Group B, C, and D staff who had completed at least three years of service by May 2014. While the Bench struck down two subsequent notifications from July 7, 2014, labeling them “arbitrary and illegal,” it invoked the “peculiar facts” of the case to ensure that even those Group B, C, and D ad hoc employees already in service under those specific orders would not be disturbed. However, the court directed that these specific employees be placed in the lowest pay scale of their respective posts.
This legal battle originated from a May 31, 2018, High Court decision which argued that the regularisation policies bypassed standard recruitment modes and violated constitutional principles established in the 2006 Umadevi case. The Supreme Court’s modification of that judgment ensures that while regular recruitment remains the standard, the humanitarian grounds and years of service rendered by these employees warrant protection. The Bench also extended these benefits to similarly situated intervenors, subject to verification by competent authorities, bringing a decade-long period of professional uncertainty to a close for the state’s contractual workforce.
