Shimla, August 30: The Himachal Pradesh High Court has pulled up the state government for denying service benefits to employees of Government Sanskrit College, Dangar (Bilaspur), and directed that their services be taken over with retrospective effect from June 17, 2021.
Justice Sandeep Sharma, while allowing a petition filed by Raman Kumar and others, quashed the government’s order dated January 6, 2025, which had rejected their plea for regularization.
The court ruled that the state had wrongly interpreted the service takeover rules framed under the 1994 notification.
The petitioners — working as Clerk, Darashanacharya, and Peon since 2017–18 — argued that despite earlier directions from a Division Bench in May 2024, the government failed to absorb them into regular service.
The state, in its reply, claimed that the employees were ineligible as they had not completed one year of service before the inspection of the college in April 2019.
Rejecting this contention, the court observed that the notification required staff to have served one year prior to the actual takeover of the college, not the inspection date.
“There is no distinction between temporary and regular employees under Clause 7 of the 1994 notification,” Justice Sharma ruled.
The court directed the government to take over the services of the petitioners with all consequential benefits, including arrears of salary, within six weeks.
It also imposed a cost of ₹25,000 on the state for unnecessarily dragging the employees into prolonged litigation.
The Sanskrit College, established in 1982 and later taken over by the government in 2021, had seen multiple policy flip-flops, with its takeover revoked in 2023 and restored in 2024.
