Point of Law: It is an exception to general rule that recruitment to public services should be on basis of merit, by an open invitation providing equal opportunity to all eligible persons to participate in selection process.

JUDGMENT :

Tarlok Singh Chauhan, J.

The appellant approached the learned writ Court by filing a petition for grant of the following substantive relief:

“That the respondents may kindly be directed to relax its policy dated 21.10.2005 and offer compassionate appointment as a Class-III/IV to the petitioner as a special case being dependent of deceased employee who was electrocuted while on duty and died on the spot.”

2. The case of the appellant is that his father, Mr. Sohan Singh, while serving as regular Chowkidar in the respondents-Board, died in harness on 14.11.2007. The deceased was the sole bread earner of the family and the appellant being son was entitled to be appointed on compassionate basis, however the application so submitted for the purpose to the respondents-Board was returned back with the observations that the compassionate appointment had been discontinued in view of new policy dated 3.11.2005. This constrained the appellant to issue legal notice and in response thereto, the respondents-Board, stated that the appellant’s mother was not entitled to be appointed on compassionate ground on account of death of her husband as per policy decision of the Board dated 3.11.2005. Thereafter the appellant again submitted representation on 22.8.2009 seeking compassionate appointment as a special case.

3. According to the appellant, being the dependent of the sole bread earner, he has wrongly been denied the compassionate appointment on the pretext of policy dated 21.10.2005, whereas the dependents of the employees of the respondent-Board taken from other states/Electricity Board have been exempted from the existence of the policy and they are being appointed on compassionate ground.

4. The respondents-Board contested the writ petition by filing reply, wherein it was stated that the respondent-Board had discontinued its policy for grant of compassionate appointment and at the time of death of father of the appellant, such policy was not in existence in the respondents-Board, thus, the appellant was not entitled for appointment on compassionate ground.

5. It was further averred that in place of earlier policy of compassionate appointment, an alternate policy had been adopted by the respondents-Board to compensate the family of the deceased employees. As per the alternate policy, mother of the appellant was paid a sum of Rs.3 lacs on 7.9.2009 as solatium and in addition, she was being paid special pension regularly and an ex-gratia amount of Rs.50,000/- stood paid to her on 13.7.2009 apart from an amount of Rs.89,808/- on account of death-cum-retirement gratuity.

6. The long and short of the reply of the respondents-Board was that once earlier policy for grant of compassionate appointment had been discontinued and substituted by a new alternate policy, there cannot be any deviation from the same, therefore, the appellant could not be considered much less appointed on compassionate ground.

7. The learned writ Court after, concluding that the compassionate appointment was not a source of recruitment, dismissed the writ petition holding therein that in absence of there being rules or regulations issued by the respondents-Board for compassionate appointment, no such claim was maintainable before the Court.

8. Mr. Tek Chand Sharma, learned counsel for the appellant, would strongly urge that the learned Single Judge, while passing the impugned judgment, has ignored the constitutional role of imparting social justice and would heavily bank upon the judgment passed by the Hon’ble Supreme court in Balbir Kaur vs. Steel Authority of India (2000) 6 SCC 493, more particularly, observations contained in paras 8, 9, 13, 15, 16 and 19, which read as under:-

8. The employer being Steel Authority of India, admittedly an authority within the meaning of Article 12 has thus an obligation to act in terms of the avowed objective of social and economic justice as enshrined in the Constitution but has the authority in the facts of the matters under considera