Twelve temporary employees of Sri Venkateswara University in Tirupati found their engagements brought to an end without any prior notice and without a separate order of termination being passed against any of them. They went to the Andhra Pradesh High Court by way of writ petition, asking the Court to treat the discontinuation of their services as illegal and to direct the university to take them back.
Their case rested on the fact that none of them had been engaged for a single, short spell. Each had been brought on for a fixed tenure, and each tenure had then been extended, in some instances more than once, so that what began as a short engagement had stretched out over a longer period through repeated renewals. On that basis, they argued that the university owed them, at minimum, a reasoned order before letting them go, rather than simply allowing the latest extension to lapse and treating that lapse as the end of the matter.
The university's answer was straightforward. It told the Court that every one of these engagements was for a defined period, that the period had been fixed and communicated at the time of each extension, and that once that period ran out, the engagement ended on its own terms. No separate act of termination was needed, on the university's case, because there was nothing left to terminate once the agreed tenure had expired; the employment had always carried its own built-in end date.
Justice Balaji Medamalli, hearing the petitions as a single judge, accepted that framing. The order holds that temporary employees engaged for a fixed tenure cannot claim a right to continue in service once that tenure comes to an end, and that this remains true even where the engagement has been extended more than once over time. Repeated extensions, on this reasoning, do not convert a fixed-term arrangement into something closer to permanent employment, and they do not by themselves create an expectation that the next extension will follow as a matter of course.
The Court also went into a factual point the petitioners had raised to support an inference of bad faith: that the university had let their engagements lapse only to quietly bring in another batch of temporary staff to do the same work. If that had been shown, it would have cut against the university's claim that the posts themselves were no longer needed. The Court found no material on record to establish any such replacement, and without that evidence, the suggestion of a disguised substitution could not carry the petitioners' case.
With both limbs of the argument rejected, the writ petitions were dismissed, leaving the twelve petitioners without the reinstatement they had sought. The order does not say whether the petitioners will be considered for any fresh round of temporary engagements the university may open in the future; it decides only that the earlier engagements, once their fixed term ran out, carried no entitlement to be carried forward.
The order sits alongside an earlier Andhra Pradesh High Court ruling involving the same university, in which the Court upheld a government-ordered faculty rationalisation exercise and held that job aspirants had no vested right to insist on the creation or retention of teaching posts. Read together, the two rulings leave the university with considerable room to restructure its temporary and contractual staffing without having to justify each individual non-renewal, so long as it can show the posts were genuinely fixed-term and not a cover for permanent work dressed up as temporary engagement.
For institutions that rely on repeatedly renewed fixed-term staff, the practical lesson is to keep the paper trail clean at every renewal: a clearly communicated end date for each extension, and no quiet substitution of one temporary batch for another doing identical work, are what let an employer rely on this kind of automatic lapse instead of having to defend a contested termination.