137 Hindi teachers lose jobs after 30 years — here's why the court said it's legal
The Supreme Court ruled their 1988 appointments were void from day one because the schools skipped a mandatory selection process. Even decades of work couldn't fix that.
30
years.
The Supreme Court ruled their 1988 appointments were void from day one because the schools skipped a mandatory selection process. Even decades of work couldn't fix that.
They taught for 30 years. Then the Supreme Court said their appointments never existed. On a morning in 2022, a bench of the Supreme Court — Justice B.R. Gavai and Justice L. Nageswara Rao — delivered a judgment that undid three decades of service for 137 Hindi teachers in Odisha. The teachers had walked into classrooms around 1988 and 1989, taught generations of students, and watched the state government change its mind about them multiple times. But none of that mattered. The court found that their very first appointment was legally dead on arrival.
When the Managing Committees hired without permission
In the late 1980s, Middle English (ME) Schools across Odisha needed Hindi teachers. The Managing Committees of these aided schools — private institutions that received government grants — appointed several teachers directly. The problem was that they skipped a mandatory step. Under Rules 5 and 6 of the Odisha Education (Recruitment and Conditions of Service of Teachers and Members of the Staff of Aided Educational Institutions) Rules, 1974, no appointment could happen without first getting approval from a statutory Board and following a prescribed selection process. The committees hired anyway. The appointments were made without following the statutory selection procedure — a legal defect that would haunt the teachers for decades.
In 1992, the Odisha government took over all ME Schools. But it excluded Hindi teachers from the takeover because Hindi was a non-examinable subject — it wasn't tested in board exams. The teachers were effectively terminated. One of them, Sulekh Chandra Pradhan, challenged this in the Orissa High Court. On 2 July 1993, the High Court directed the government to look into their grievances. What followed was nearly three decades of administrative whiplash.
The government's promise that kept unravelling
The state government initially decided to adjust 137 Hindi teachers as Assistant Teachers. Then it withdrew that decision. Despite the withdrawal, some District Inspectors issued appointment orders anyway. In 2009, the government issued an order adjusting the teachers — but a vigilance enquiry later revealed that this order had been obtained by suppressing the earlier withdrawal order. The government called it fraud. The suppressed withdrawal note sat quietly in the file, a concrete document that the 2009 order had ignored entirely. In 2014 and again in 2015, after issuing show cause notices, the government terminated the teachers.
The teachers fought back. They approached the Odisha Administrative Tribunal — a quasi-judicial body that hears service disputes of government employees. The Tribunal initially rejected their cases — on 12 April 2012 and again on 23 September 2013. But on 9 May 2014, the Orissa High Court set aside the termination for violation of natural justice and remanded the matter. Then, on 18 May 2017, a bench of the Tribunal at Bhubaneswar allowed the teachers' claims. On 30 January 2018, another bench at Cuttack followed that decision. The High Court upheld those orders on 20 December 2018. The government appealed to the Supreme Court.
Why the Tribunal's own orders contradicted each other
Here is where the case took a strange turn. The Tribunal had rejected the teachers' claims twice — in April 2012 and September 2013. Then, in May 2017 and January 2018, different benches of the same Tribunal allowed identical claims from the same set of teachers. The later benches did not distinguish or even mention the earlier orders. The Supreme Court found this unacceptable. It applied the doctrine of judicial propriety — the principle that coordinate benches of the same court or tribunal must follow each other's decisions unless there is a good reason to differ. Ignoring earlier orders entirely, the court said, makes the later orders unsustainable. The court noted that the Tribunal had ignored its own earlier contrary orders, which violated well-established norms of judicial discipline.
But the deeper question was about the appointments themselves. Could 30 years of teaching turn a void appointment into a valid one?
The Supreme Court's answer: void is void
The court said no. It held that appointments made without following the selection procedure under Rules 5 and 6 of the 1974 Rules are "void ab initio" — invalid from the very beginning, as if they never happened. The court explicitly stated that such appointments "cannot be sustained, irrespective of the duration of service rendered." No amount of time served can cure this defect. The reasoning was simple: if the law requires a specific process for hiring, and that process is skipped, the appointment is a legal nullity. You cannot build a valid career on a foundation that the law never recognised.
The court also rejected an argument that the 1974 Rules applied only to grant-in-aid posts (positions funded by government grants) and not to non-grant posts. The bench clarified that the Rules apply to the institution as a whole. If a school is recognised as an aided educational institution, all its appointments — regardless of whether the specific post is on grant or not — must follow the statutory process.
This principle is not new. In Official Liquidator v. Dayanand (2008), the Supreme Court had held that appointments made in violation of statutory rules are void ab initio and cannot be regularised. The 2022 judgment applied the same logic to the Odisha Hindi teachers. The court also cited Ayurvidya Prasarak Mandal v. Geeta Bhaskar Pendse (1991) and J&K Public Service Commission v. Dr. Narinder Mohan (1994) to reinforce that statutory selection procedures are mandatory, not directory.
The Supreme Court quashed the Tribunal and High Court orders and dismissed the teachers' original applications. The operative order was clear: the appeals were allowed, the impugned judgments were set aside, and the original applications were dismissed. The 137 Hindi teachers lost their jobs — not because they taught badly, but because the first step was never legal.
What this means for every government employee
This judgment carries a brutal lesson for anyone who works in an aided institution: check how you were appointed. If the selection process violated statutory rules, your years of service may not save you. The court did not say the teachers were incompetent or dishonest. It said the law does not bend for long service when the appointment itself was void.
For lawyers and administrators, the case reinforces two principles. First, a void appointment cannot be ratified by delay or by subsequent government orders — especially if those orders were obtained by suppressing earlier withdrawals. Second, tribunals and courts must maintain judicial discipline. A later bench cannot ignore an earlier coordinate bench's decision on the same issue without distinguishing it. The Supreme Court also clarified that a non-speaking dismissal of a Special Leave Petition does not constitute approval of the High Court's reasoning or a declaration of law under Article 141 of the Constitution.
THE PLAY: Before accepting a government job in an aided institution, verify that the appointment followed the statutory selection process — if it didn't, even three decades of service won't protect you.
The teachers taught for thirty years. The court said their appointments never existed.