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The Supreme Court has emphasised that redesignation cannot be said to be a regular appointment as it is only that one post or category or cadre which is given equivalence with another existing post or category or cadre.

"The very usage of the term/phrase “regular appointment” has to be given its proper interpretation and cannot be rendered redundant or superfluous. Here, there is a distinction between re-designation and regular appointment," a bench of Justices Hima Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah said.

The bench clarified whenever a scheme or policy is brought into force, ceteris paribus, the court could not and would not import something which is not present therein and which may not be proper to be interfered with, especially when it relates to financial matters where primacy is required to be granted to the pay-master as to what scale was to be granted to the category of staff concerned. By its very nature, such exercise would fall under the realm of policy-formulation, it added.

The matter related to Research Assistants being redesignated as Lecturer and Assistant Professors and drawing same salary as Assistant Professor should also be granted the revision in pay scales as per the Career Advancement Scheme after completing eight years of service.

The court said when the CAS itself envisaged that it was meant for persons who were directly recruited as assistant professors. 

"The very usage of the term/phrase “regular appointment” has to be given its proper interpretation and cannot be rendered redundant or superfluous. Here, there is a distinction between re-designation and regular appointment," the bench said.

Notably, the court pointed out, the CAS itself restricted the benefits flowing therefrom to persons who had completed eight years of service “after regular appointment” – this showed the clear-cut intent as to which of the two cadres were the subject-matter of those benefits. 

"Thus, there was no ambiguity in the CAS per se. If the intention was that the benefits should go across the board to both cadres, then there was no requirement to restrict it to persons who had completed eight years of service after regular appointment," it said.

Significantly, the court recorded, it is not in dispute that the re-designated Research Assistants/Assistant Professors were never directly appointed as Lecturers/Assistant Professors. 

Only by reason that the Research Assistants were receiving the same pay-scale as the direct recruits, would not entitle them to get benefit of CAS as it was subject to fulfilment of certain conditions, including completion of certain years of service viz eight years, it added.

The court allowed an appeal by the Rajasthan Agricultural University, Bikaner against the division and single bench order of the Rajasthan High Court. It held that the writ petitioners/private respondents were not entitled to benefits under the CAS, as notified by the Government of India by a letter of July 22, 1988.

"If the two cadres are given exactly similar benefits under orders of the court, then it would amount to doing something indirectly which cannot be done directly. Moreover, this was substantially negated in the earlier round of litigation," the bench said.

With regard to a plea for counting of ad hoc services rendered by some of the respondents, the bench reiterated the CAS is essentially a policy, and as such, they cannot claim, nor would they have any vested right for claiming that the clauses therein be interpreted in a particular manner.

"Such an interpretative exercise would have to be left, in the domain of the appellant, subject to the state government’s directives unless patently perverse or arbitrary. The High Court, hence, was not justified in counting of the ad-hoc service rendered by the respondents for reckoning the period of computation as required for applying the CAS," the bench said.

The court, however, directed that there should not be any recoveries from the respondents.