The regularisation gambit

THE Congress government in Punjab has predictably gone into overdrive to appease various categories of voters in the run-up to the General Election. Plans are afoot to regularise the services of 37,000 ad hoc, daily-wage, temporary, work-charged and outsourced employees, who have been in the protest mode over the past two years. The government, which recently decided to implement recommendations of the Sixth Pay Commission, has set up a ministerial panel to frame a law that will replace the Punjab Ad hoc, Contractual, Daily-Wage, Temporary, Work-Charged and Outsourced Employees’ Welfare Act, 2016. The Act had been notified by the then SAD-BJP dispensation days before the 2017 Assembly elections were announced. The law was challenged in the Punjab & Haryana High Court on the grounds that it infringed upon the constitutional provision for a level playing field in public employment.

Surely, it won’t be a walk in the park for the Capt Amarinder Singh government to make the new law legally tenable. Punjab cannot afford to ignore the example of Haryana, which has already burnt its fingers on the issue. Last year, the High Court had quashed a policy, framed by then Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda’s Congress government, to regularise contractual and ad hoc employees ahead of the 2014 Assembly elections. The court had asserted that the ‘regularisation business was not a side window opened to validate illegal appointments’. Haryana had then moved the Supreme Court, which ordered status quo, providing a breather to about 50,000 employees.

More often than not, contractual and ad hoc workers are appointed without following a fair and transparent procedure. ‘Recommendations’ invariably come into play, even as there is little or no verification of the candidates’ antecedents. Regularising their services in one stroke, across the board, will demoralise the regular staffers who have been selected on merit. If the government is bent on this unwise course, it should at least separate the wheat from the chaff. Why not put eligible employees to the test? Only the best of the lot should make the cut.