Two decades is not an unusual age for a labour dispute to reach its next stage in an Indian court, and the BHEL Jhansi contract workers' case is no exception. The Labour Commissioner of Uttar Pradesh had passed an order on 5 January 2005 granting 265 contract workers at the Bharat Heavy Electricals unit in Jhansi equal pay with regular employees doing comparable work. BHEL challenged that order by writ petition, and it has taken until 15 October 2026, when Justice Saurabh Shyam Shamshery pronounced judgment after reserving it on 9 October, for the Allahabad High Court to rule on it.
The Labour Commissioner had relied on duty rosters, attendance logs, wage slips and gate passes to conclude that the contract workers were doing the same jobs as their regularly appointed counterparts and were entitled to the same pay. BHEL's defence rested on a familiar line from the Supreme Court's judgment in State of Haryana v. Charanjit Singh, which holds that a contract worker's terms of service flow from the contract itself, and that sharing a job title or designation with a regular employee does not by itself create an entitlement to equal pay.
The High Court did not accept BHEL's broader Charanjit Singh argument that contract status alone bars an equal pay claim; instead, applying the Supreme Court's ruling in State of Punjab v. Jagjit Singh on the onus of proof, it held that a worker seeking equal pay for equal work has to show that he actually performed the same duties as the regular employee, matching not just the task but its quality and its sensitivity, meaning the degree of skill, responsibility and judgment the work called for. The burden of establishing that parity sits with the worker making the claim, not with the employer resisting it.
Measured against that standard, the Court found the Labour Commissioner's 2005 order wanting. The comparative chart that had anchored the finding of parity, in the Court's reading, amounted to little more than a list of names, designations and the contractors who had engaged the workers. The duty charts placed alongside it recorded shift assignments and little else. Neither document, on the High Court's assessment, descended into the kind of comparison the law actually calls for, one that looks at what each worker was asked to do, how demanding that work was and how much responsibility rode on it.
The judgment is as pointed about the requirement of reasoning as it is about the burden of proof. A finding of equal pay for equal work, the Court said, needs specific consideration of the comparative material and reasons that follow from it, not a conclusion that simply follows the existence of a shared designation. The Labour Commissioner's order, treated as cursory on this score, could not stand as framed.
Rather than reject the workers' claim outright, the Court sent it back. The matter now returns to the authority for a fresh decision, this time against the evidentiary standard the High Court has laid down, and the order directs that it be decided within six months. The workers get another opportunity to establish parity with documentary and testimonial material that goes to the substance of their duties, not merely their titles.
For contract workers elsewhere making similar claims, the practical message is about the kind of record that will hold up before the courts. A list of names and contractor details, however detailed on its own terms, will not carry a claim through scrutiny on appeal. What is needed is material that lets an adjudicating authority compare the actual content of two jobs, side by side, and explain in its own reasoning why they match or why they do not.
Employers running contract labour alongside a regular workforce will find the judgment cuts the other way to an extent. It does not hold that contract status alone defeats an equal pay claim, and BHEL's reliance on Charanjit Singh secured it a remand, not a final dismissal of the workers' case. The six-month clock that now runs on the Labour Commissioner means the underlying dispute, well into its third decade, is due for one more round rather than a close.