Can’t invoke writ powers to save jobs hit by policy decisions: Punjab and Haryana HC

Making it clear that personal hardship alone cannot open the doors of constitutional courts, the Punjab and Haryana High Court has ruled that teaching faculty cannot demand continuation of a discontinued college course merely to protect itself from possible retrenchment.

“The courts cannot be converted into forums for raising perceived hardship — it is not every disquiet that attracts the aegis of constitutional remedy,” the Bench ruled. Service-related fears did not confer the faculty the legal standing necessary to challenge a purely administrative policy decision, it said.

“The petitioners, in order to avoid the adverse effect on their career on account of discontinuation of a course cannot be permitted to invoke the extraordinary writ jurisdiction of this court by seeking a writ for continuation of the course in question,” the Bench of Chief Justice Sheel Nagu and Justice Sumeet Goel held.

The court observed that the teachers might find themselves “incidentally prejudiced” because of the college decision. But such indirect or incidental harm alone would not give them the legal standing to challenge the college or the managing society’s administrative decision through a writ petition.

The teachers had argued that discontinuing BA degree course in a Sangrur college would impact their careers and lead to retrenchment. The court asserted such collateral detriment might indeed cause hardship, but it did not automatically give teachers the legal right to challenge the administrative decision under writ jurisdiction.

“The doctrine of locus standi requires a direct, tangible and legally cognisable injury. A person merely affected in consequence of a decision does not, by that token alone, acquire legal standing to impugn it,” the Bench asserted.

The Bench cautioned that constitutional writ jurisdiction could not become a forum to address every perceived hardship or disquiet.