Orissa High Court Upholds Regularization for Engineer, Slams State for Discriminatory Treatment

Cuttack, Odisha – The Orissa High Court has dismissed an appeal filed by the State of Odisha, affirming a single-judge bench's decision to regularize the services of an Assistant Executive Engineer who was denied the same benefits granted to his colleagues. A Division Bench of Chief Justice Harish Tandon and Justice Murahari Sri Raman held that treating the engineer differently from his similarly situated counterparts was "unfair and unjustified."

The court upheld the principle that individuals on an equal footing cannot be segregated and denied benefits without a rational basis, effectively ending a protracted legal battle for engineer Satyashri Mohapatra.

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A Long Fight for Parity

The case centered around Satyashri Mohapatra, a Mechanical Engineer who began his service under the Department of Water Resources in 2004 as an NMR/DLR Graduate Engineer. The core of his grievance was that nine of his colleagues, all Civil Graduate Engineers engaged under similar circumstances, were brought into the work-charged establishment as Assistant Engineers in February 2013, while he was excluded.

After successfully challenging this discrimination before the Odisha Administrative Tribunal (OAT) in 2017, Mohapatra was granted the same status with retrospective effect from February 8, 2013. However, his struggle continued when his counterparts were later regularized and promoted to Assistant Executive Engineers, again with retrospective benefits, while his claim was repeatedly rejected. This led him through multiple rounds of litigation, culminating in a writ petition where a Single Judge ruled in his favor on October 28, 2024, directing the state to regularize his service. The State of Odisha challenged this order, bringing the matter before the Division Bench.

State's Arguments vs. Engineer's Plea for Equality

Arguments by the State of Odisha: The state, represented by Additional Government Advocate Saswat Das, contended that regularizing Mohapatra from the same date (08.02.2013) would violate government rules and cause injustice to senior regular engineers in the Mechanical Wing. The government argued that the cases were different as Mohapatra belonged to the Mechanical wing while the others were from the Civil wing. It was also submitted that such a move could "open floodgates" for similar claims from other employees. The state proposed a later regularization date of 2018, based on its interpretation of service rules.

Arguments by Satyashri Mohapatra: Senior Advocate Prafulla Kumar Rath, representing Mohapatra, argued that the state's actions were patently discriminatory. He highlighted that courts had consistently found Mohapatra to be on par with his nine counterparts. Since those engineers were regularized with retrospective effect as a one-time measure, denying Mohapatra the same benefit was arbitrary and violated the principle of equality.

Court's Reasoning: "Cannot Be Treated Differently"

The Division Bench meticulously examined the case's long history and found the state's arguments for differential treatment unconvincing. The court observed that the OAT had already settled the issue of parity in 2017, stating that Mohapatra "cannot be discriminated from other nine graduate Engineers."

In upholding the Single Judge's decision, the bench cited several Supreme Court judgments, including Raman Kumar v. Union of India (2023), which held that regularizing some employees while leaving out others who are similarly situated is discriminatory and violative of Article 14 of the Constitution.

The court's judgment extracted a key finding from the Single Judge's order:

"In the humble view of the Court, the above plea to deny the petitioner’s regularization is unfair and unjustified when all along he stood at par with his counterparts. It can therefore be said that the petitioner cannot be differently with the stand taken by the opposite parties... the petitioner is in service for quite a long time and still waiting to be absorbed, whereas, the services of others at par with him have been regularized and considering the matter in its entirety, the Court reaches at a conclusion that it is fit case, where he should be treated equally."

The bench concluded that the state had "miserably failed to justify its grounds" and that there was no perversity in the Single Judge's factual findings.

Final Decision and Implications

The Orissa High Court dismissed the state's appeal, thereby upholding the judgment directing the regularization of Satyashri Mohapatra. The court extended the timeline for compliance, ordering the state to complete the necessary steps within a fresh period of eight weeks.

This judgment serves as a strong reiteration of the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment in service matters. It underscores that administrative distinctions, such as belonging to different engineering wings (Mechanical vs. Civil), cannot be used as a pretext to deny benefits when employees are otherwise on an identical footing.