N K CHAUHAN Vs. STATE OF GUJARAT

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is a typical 'service' appeal, by special leave which prompts the topical question: Is it wiser national policy to process disputes regarding seniority, promotion, termination and allied matters affecting the public services, through the docket-bound, form alised, methodology of the judicature adopting its traditional, time-consuming, tier-upon-tier system and handicapped by absence of administrative expertise, accessibility to critical information and other limitations on the mode and extent of relief, or, alternatively, through built-in, high-powered, but credibility-wise less commanding agencies of composite skills and processes and flexible remedial jurisdictions 'Justice and Reform' is a recurrent interrogation.

(2.) Our civil services, if only the static and stratified system were transformed and the men properly oriented and activated, may well prove equal to the dynamic challenges of our times but for the pathetic phenomenon of numbers of officials being locked in long forensic battles. This litigative pathology of the members of the public services deplorably diverts the undivided energies, sensitive understanding and people-based disposition demanded of them for the fulfilment of the Nation's Tryst with Destiny through implementation of massive and multiform developmental plans. Hopefully constructive thinking on impregnable, competent and quick-acting (but not derobed or devalued) infra-structures and procedures for improving and accelerating the system of justice to the public services, is currently under way.

(3.) Now to the merits. The briefs are big and the arguments long, but the factual matrix and the legal conflict lend themselves to be condensed without detriment. The competition between two categories of members borne on the cadre of Deputy Collectors of the State of Gujarat viz., direct recruits and in-service promotees, on the issue of seniority inter se, with its futuristic career overtones, is the crunch question in this civil appeal. The grey area of 'service jurisprudence' covered before us encompasses several decisions and if 'by good disputing, shall the law be well known', there has been so much disputation of learned length at the bar that the legal points should have been more pellucid than the precedents read and re-read made us feel. 'The aid of the purifying ordeal of skilled argument' when too lapidary and finical reaches a point of no return, despite Magarry, J., to the contrary in Cordell v. Second Clanfield Properties Ltd., (1968) 3 All ER 746.