Follow Regularisation Law

Jammu and Kashmir's corridors of justice have, for years, echoed with one recurring plea: regularise us. Ad hoc, contractual, consolidated and daily-wage employees have queued up before tribunals and courts, not in hundreds but in their thousands, each one fighting an individual battle for a right that ought to have been settled by policy rather than litigation. The Full Bench ruling of the High Court, clarifying that the statutory right to regularisation accrues the moment an employee fulfils the conditions under the 2010 Act - and not on the date a Government order happens to be issued - is therefore more than a legal clarification. It is an indictment of an administrative culture that has treated regularisation as a favour to be dispensed at will rather than an entitlement to be honoured on time.

The scale of the problem is what makes this ruling significant. Decades of backdoor appointments, made without advertisement or selection, have left the Government sitting on an enormous, unresolved liability. A financially stretched Union Territory, dependent almost entirely on Central grants even to pay its existing permanent workforce, now finds thousands more employees pressing for regularisation, seniority protection and consequent career progression. This is not a fiscal inconvenience alone; it is a structural crisis decades in the making, and one no single judgement can fully resolve.

What the Court has done, however, is remove the administration's room for manoeuvre. For too long, the 2010 Act was interpreted selectively, its provisions read to suit convenience rather than consistency, allowing successive Governments to pick and choose whom to regularise and when. By holding that the date of entitlement is fixed by law and cannot be manipulated through administrative delay, the Full Bench has closed a loophole that fuelled endless litigation and unequal treatment among similarly placed employees.

The onus now shifts squarely to the Government. It must resist the temptation to circumvent this ruling through familiar tactics - renaming posts, restructuring cadres, or hiring afresh to sidestep the regularisation queue. Such manoeuvres would only spawn another generation of litigation, dragging the same battle through fresh rounds of writ petitions and appeals, at cost to both the exchequer and public trust. Implementation, not further interpretation, is what this moment demands. Ad hoc employment cannot remain a permanent purgatory. This judgement offers a clear opportunity to close a chapter of administrative arbitrariness. This infinite cycle must end now.