‘Govt can’t blow hot and cold’: HC restores Old Pension Scheme to KU teachers
In a significant ruling likely to benefit university teachers, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has held that Kurukshetra University employees appointed against posts advertised on or before October 28, 2005, are entitled to the benefit of the Old Pension Scheme (OPS) in line with the state government’s office memorandum (OM) dated May 8, 2023.
The assertion came as Justice Tribhuvan Dahiya’s Bench imposed Rs 5 lakh costs and quashed the government’s subsequent withdrawal of this benefit as “arbitrary” and “deplorable.”
Setting aside the impugned memo dated July 24, 2023, whereby the earlier benefit was withdrawn without assigning any reason, Justice Dahiya ruled: “Such an about-turn without any rationale smacks of high-handedness on the government’s part which is deplorable, and cannot be acceded to. In the constitutional scheme of things, no executive authority can anoint to itself absolute power to act or not to act at will, without mentioning any justifiable reason; it is rather anathema to the rule of law that must permeate every executive action.”
The court further directed the respondents to extend the benefit of OM dated May 8, 2023, to petitioners appointed against the posts advertised on or before October 28, 2005. They would be allowed two weeks’ time to complete the requisite formalities, and thereafter their NPS accounts would be closed. They would be made members of the OPS and due benefits as admissible would be released.
The directions on five petitions were ordered to be implemented within eight weeks of receiving the order’s certified copy. Justice Dahiya made it clear that Rs 4 lakh, out of the total costs, was payable by Haryana Higher Education Department and the remaining by Kurukshetra University.
The dispute arose after the petitioners, appointed as lecturers between May and November 2006, were initially inducted into the OPS and allotted GPF numbers. Following the state’s decision to switch to the New Defined Contributory Pension Scheme (NPS) for employees joining service on or after January 1, 2006, the university shifted them into the NPS without their consent, the Bench was told.
Referring to “doublespeak by the government, Justice Dahiya asserted its stand in the written statement was that the varsity was an autonomous body and free to take its own decisions, among other things, regarding appointments. But it could not revise pay scales and consequent pensions, etc. without the government’s prior approval.
It was not the government’s case that communications to the varsity asking it to implement the New Defined Pension Scheme were issued after the university sought its approval or implementation. It was the government’s fiat to be followed.
“The justification to withhold benefits of OM dated May 8, 2023, issued under the new pension scheme from the University employees on the plea that the same were never asked for by the latter, cannot be countenanced. It only shows the State Government’s changing stands to suit its whims, and an attempt to justify the same by using perverse logic. It cannot be allowed to blow hot and cold in the same breath and take self-contradictory stands at the cost of university employees, who have been made to suffer due to this apathetic attitude…. The callous attitude towards university employees is deplorable to say the least, and the government too is hereby censured on that account,” the Bench asserted.
Chandigarh