Kalyan Singh Pawar spent close to twenty eight years working as a Daftari in the Town and Country Planning Department before the State of Madhya Pradesh decided, rather late in his career, that something was wrong with how he had been taken on in the first place. No one disputed that he had turned up for work and done the job for nearly three decades. The dispute was entirely about paperwork from the start of his service, and the Jabalpur Bench of the Madhya Pradesh High Court was not persuaded that this was reason enough to throw him out.
The chain of events behind the termination went back to 1999, when the High Court had passed a direction concerning appointments of this kind made without following the prescribed selection route. The department sat on that direction for years before finally issuing Pawar a show cause notice, and it was only after he had put in close to three decades of continuous service that his employment was brought to an end. He argued before the court that he had followed due process at the time of his appointment, and that even if there had been some procedural lapse, it belonged to the department, not to him.
The State's position was straightforward. Pawar's initial appointment as Daftari had not gone through the ordinary recruitment process, and an irregular appointment, in its submission, did not ripen into a right to continue in service merely because decades had passed without anyone noticing. The department treated the 1999 direction as sufficient legal cover for acting against him now, whatever the delay.
Justice Deepak Khot did not accept that the delay was irrelevant. The judgment records that the State, instead of removing Pawar after such a long period of service, ought to have regularised him. The court drew a line between an appointment that was irregular, meaning it departed from the prescribed procedure without any fraud or misrepresentation, and one that was illegal from the outset. Pawar's case, on the facts before the court, fell on the irregular side of that line, and nearly three decades of unbroken service tilted the balance further in his favour.
The relief granted was itself telling. The court did not simply reinstate Pawar on his old post and leave it there. It quashed the termination and directed the State to regularise his appointment on a post that is meant to be filled through direct recruitment, even if that means he ends up on a lower pay scale than the one he held as Daftari. The judgment treats this as the fair middle path: the department gets a correctly filled post, and Pawar does not lose his livelihood over a filing defect from the last millennium. It is a solution that neither side gets everything it asked for, which is usually a sign that a court has actually weighed the competing claims rather than picking one wholesale.
The ruling sits alongside a run of similar Madhya Pradesh High Court decisions this year involving employees whose appointments were questioned only after twenty years or more of service. Government departments in the state have leaned on old procedural gaps to clear out long-serving but informally appointed staff, and the courts have increasingly asked why the lapse was tolerated for so long if it mattered as much as the department now claims. Pawar's case gives that approach another concrete outcome: regularisation on a different post rather than either a clean reinstatement or a dismissal upheld.
For public employers, the lesson is less about this one Daftari and more about timing. A procedural defect in an appointment does not become weightier with age; if anything, courts are treating long, unbroken service as a reason to find a corrective short of termination. Departments sitting on old irregularities would do well to resolve them early, because a court asked to undo thirty years of service on a decades-old technicality is unlikely to oblige without first asking what took so long. Human resources teams across state departments that still carry legacy appointments made outside the formal recruitment channel should treat this line of cases as a reason to regularise those positions proactively, rather than waiting for a retirement, a pension dispute or an audit objection to force the question decades down the line, when the employee's service record will carry far more weight than any paperwork gap from the year of appointment.