Hon’ble Sudhir Agarwal, J.—The case has been called in revised. None appeared. The Bench Secretary has placed before me a copy of the letter dated 24.8.2013 of the High Court Bar Association, Allahabad addressed to Hon’ble the Chief Justice informing that the Association has resolved to abstain from judicial work on 26.8.2013, which has been circulated under the order of Hon’ble Senior Judge dated 24.8.2013 to this Bench. In the circumstances, I myself have perused the record and heard the learned Standing Counsel for respondents.

2. In all the writ petitions common questions of facts and law are involved and therefore they have been taken together and being decided by this common judgment.

3. The Parliament, in furtherance of its public welfare activities, enacted National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, 2005 (hereinafter referred to as “Act, 2005”) with an objective for enhancement of livelihood security of the poor households in rural areas of the country by providing at least one hundred days of guaranteed wage employment to every poor household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

4. Petitioners under a contract of personal service are working as Technical Assistant under National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (hereinafter referred to as “NREGS”). They have been directed by means of the orders impugned in these writ petitions to execute a contract on the prescribed format, with the further direction that in case such contracts are not executed by them, it shall be presumed that they are not interested to continue to work in the aforesaid capacity, besides, withholding honorarium, payable to them.

5. The common ground taken on behalf of petitioners is that once they have been employed under a service contract without any limitation of time, which is continuing, there is no justification or authority vested with the respondents to compel them to execute a fresh contract on a prescribed format wherein terms and conditions are different. It is said that the existing terms and conditions of employment of petitioners, under the existing contract of personal service, so long as that contract is continuing, cannot be altered by the respondents, by extending threat of termination or non payment of honorarium to petitioners and this insistence on the part of respondents is patently illegal, without jurisdiction and, even otherwise, arbitrary.

6. Before dealing with the rival contentions on the issues raised in these writ petitions, it would be necessary to have a brief factual matrix of these cases. I may give relevant facts involved in all these writ petitions in very brief, separately (writ petition wise):

(a) Writ Petition No. 7998 of 2013 (hereinafter referred to as “first petition”) has been filed by 41 petitioners, who are working as Technical Assistant in District Sonbhadra under NREGS. It is said that advertisement were published in the year 2006-08 in various daily newspapers inviting applications for preparation of panel of Junior Engineer/Technical Assistant in District Sonbhadra. Petitioners applied and a selection committee after perusing testimonials/educational merits of the petitioners and also on the basis of interview, selected them. The aforesaid recommendation of selection committee was approved by the State Government and, thereafter, appointment letters were issued. One of such appointment letter has been placed on record as Annexure 4 to the writ petition (at page 29) which pertains to Sri Avadh Narayan Singh, impleaded as petitioner No. 22. The aforesaid letter is in the form of an Office Order, passed by District Program Coordinator, Sonbhadra (who is District Magistrate in the present case), and, it reads as under:

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