Apprentices Under the Apprentices Act, 1961: Why They Are Not 'Workmen' and What Employers Still Owe Them

By S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors · Published 21 October 2026 · Informational content, not legal advice: see our disclaimer

A business that has run an apprenticeship programme for years will, sooner or later, have an apprentice who claims to have been doing a regular employee's job all along and demands to be treated as one, including the right to raise an industrial dispute if the engagement ends badly. Employers often assume this is a straightforward fight about facts, how much of the apprentice's actual work looked like a workman's job. It is usually a cleaner fight about jurisdiction instead, because the Apprentices Act, 1961 was deliberately written to take apprentices out of the ordinary labour law framework altogether, for the whole duration of a properly constituted apprenticeship.

This guide sets out why that jurisdictional bar exists, where a Rajasthan High Court ruling in 2023 applied it squarely against a group of apprentices who tried to litigate as workmen, and what an employer still has to get right on the apprenticeship itself to keep the benefit of that bar.

The statutory bar: Section 18 of the Apprentices Act

Section 18 of the Apprentices Act, 1961 provides that save as otherwise expressly provided in the Act, the provisions of any other labour law do not apply to, or in relation to, an apprentice. The structure of the 1961 Act treats an apprentice as a trainee undergoing a defined course of practical training, not as an employee rendering labour in exchange for wages in the ordinary sense, and the Act builds its own separate machinery for disputes arising out of that training relationship rather than leaving them to the Industrial Disputes Act or similar legislation.

The Supreme Court's older authority in U.P. State Electricity Board v. Shiv Mohan Singh is generally cited as the foundation for treating apprentices engaged under the 1961 Act as trainees rather than workmen, with ordinary labour law protections not extending to them for the duration of their training. Section 18's blanket language, that no other labour law applies, is what gives that position its force rather than leaving it to inference from the apprentice's job duties alone.

The Rajasthan High Court's 2023 application of this bar

The point was tested squarely in Indian Oil Corporation Limited v. Narendra Singh Shekhawat and a batch of connected writ petitions decided by the Rajasthan High Court in August 2023. A group of apprentices engaged under the 1961 Act had raised what they framed as an industrial dispute, which a labour authority referred to a tribunal, which in turn passed an award in their favour treating them as workmen entitled to the relief that status carries. Indian Oil challenged the reference and the award by writ petition, arguing that a dispute involving apprentices engaged under the 1961 Act could never be an industrial dispute in the first place.

The court agreed, holding that a dispute arising under the Apprentices Act, 1961 cannot be treated as an industrial dispute under the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, and that the reference to the tribunal, and the tribunal's award, were accordingly without jurisdiction and void. The court treated the 1961 Act as a special statute that displaces the general Industrial Disputes Act for this category of dispute, and pointed to the Act's own grievance machinery through the Apprenticeship Adviser under Section 20 as the route such a dispute should have taken instead.

The apprentices in that case had argued that their actual day-to-day duties were indistinguishable from a regular workman's, label aside. The ruling did not resolve that underlying factual dispute on the merits, because it did not need to: once the engagement was genuinely one under the 1961 Act, Section 18 removed the tribunal's jurisdiction to decide the dispute as an industrial one at all, regardless of how the apprentice's actual duties compared to a workman's.

Why the label is not the end of the inquiry

The Rajasthan ruling should not be read as meaning any employer can simply call someone an apprentice and escape labour law entirely. The jurisdictional bar in Section 18 depends on the engagement genuinely being one under the Apprentices Act, meaning the apprentice is registered under the Act, engaged for a defined trade or designated training programme, and actually undergoing training rather than performing the full, unsupervised duties of a sanctioned employee post under an apprentice's title.

A Calcutta High Court decision from 1994, Chittaranjan Das v. Durgapur Project, is older authority for a related point: that being called an apprentice under the 1961 Act does not automatically make someone a workman under separate legislation like the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act either, which cuts both ways, confirming the apprentice's distinct status generally, while still leaving open, on different facts, whether a particular engagement was ever a genuine apprenticeship to begin with. Where an employer has stretched the apprenticeship label over what is, in substance, a regular job, with the apprentice performing unsupervised production work indistinguishable from a permanent employee's for years beyond the sanctioned training period, a tribunal or court retains the ability to look past the label and ask what was actually happening.

What employers still have to get right

Keeping the benefit of Section 18 starts with the basics most employers assume they have covered and sometimes have not: a written contract of apprenticeship actually registered as required under the Act, a training period that tracks the designated trade's prescribed duration rather than running indefinitely, and a training schedule that genuinely rotates the apprentice through learning different aspects of the trade rather than parking them permanently on one production task that happens to be useful to the employer's ordinary operations.

Employers should also treat the end of an apprenticeship, and any decision not to offer regular employment afterward, as a distinct event governed by the Act's own provisions rather than by whatever termination process applies to regular staff, since conflating the two is one of the more common ways an employer ends up facing litigation it assumed Section 18 would simply prevent. Where a dispute does arise during the apprenticeship, directing it to the Apprenticeship Adviser's process under Section 20 in the first instance, rather than letting it drift into a labour department reference, is both the legally correct route and the one most likely to be upheld if challenged later.

Record keeping deserves more attention than most HR teams give it. A clear training log showing what the apprentice was actually taught each month, signed stipend records matching the prescribed rates, and a registration certificate kept on file rather than merely applied for, together build the documentary record an employer needs if the genuineness of the apprenticeship is ever challenged years later, when memories of the actual day-to-day training have faded and the paperwork is all that is left to argue from.

What happens once the apprenticeship period actually ends

Section 18's bar operates for the duration of a genuine apprenticeship under the Act and does not continue indefinitely once the apprentice's training period has run its course. An apprentice who is kept on past the sanctioned training period, performing the same work without any change in status or a fresh engagement, strengthens exactly the kind of argument that the arrangement has, in substance, become regular employment, whatever label the paperwork still uses. Employers who want certainty here are better served formally concluding the apprenticeship on schedule and then making an affirmative, documented decision about whether to offer regular employment, rather than allowing the apprenticeship to simply continue past its own stated end date by default.

A separate, related trap is the apprentice who is formally released at the end of the sanctioned period but then re-engaged, without a meaningful gap and on effectively identical terms, as a fresh apprentice for a different nominal trade. Tribunals asked to look past this kind of serial re-engagement have generally been willing to treat the underlying relationship as continuous employment rather than a succession of genuine, separate apprenticeships, particularly where the work performed never actually changed across the supposed training periods. A business genuinely training successive batches of apprentices in different trades faces none of this risk, but one simply recycling the apprentice label to avoid regular employment obligations is building a dispute it will eventually lose on the facts, Section 18 notwithstanding.

Frequently Asked Questions

References & Further Reading

The provisions and rulings below were relied on for this guide. The position can change with amendments and later decisions, so check the current text and the latest case law before acting on any of it.

1. Apprentices Act, 1961, Section 18 (exclusion of other labour laws in relation to an apprentice, save as expressly provided in the Act)
2. Apprentices Act, 1961, Section 20 (reference of disputes to the Apprenticeship Adviser)
3. Indian Oil Corporation Limited v. Narendra Singh Shekhawat and connected writ petitions, Rajasthan High Court, decided August 2023 (dispute under the 1961 Act held not to be an industrial dispute; reference and tribunal award held without jurisdiction)
4. U.P. State Electricity Board v. Shiv Mohan Singh (Supreme Court, cited authority treating apprentices under the 1961 Act as trainees rather than workmen)
5. Chittaranjan Das v. Durgapur Project Limited, Calcutta High Court, 1994 (an apprentice under the 1961 Act is not automatically a workman under the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946)