B VENKATACHALACHAR Vs. UNION OF INDIA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) When there was a reorganisation of the States under the provisions of the States Reorganisation Act and the new State of Mysore came into being under its provisions on November 1, 1956, the petitioner was a second division clerk in the District Court. He had been transferred to this court as such second division clerk on October 8, 1956 from the post of a second division clerk in the District Court, The pay scale applicable to a second division clerk in the district Court was Rs.40 progressively rising to Rs.80, whereas the pay scale applicable to the second division clerk in the High Court was Rs. 45 progressively rising to Rs. 100.00.

(2.) The provisional inter-State seniority list which was published by the Registrar of this court on June 18, 1965 assigned, the first rank to the petitioner in the cadre of the second division clerks of this court. That list was a provisional inter-State seniority list pertaining to the non-gazetted officers of this court. But bv the final inter-State seniority list which was prepared by the Central Government and published bv the Registrar of this court on August 22, 1967, the petitioner was assigned the 42nd rank. In this writ petition the petitioner asks us to quash that part of the final Inter-State seniority list which brought down his rank in that way and asks us to issue a mandamus directing the restoration of the first rank assigned to him by the provisional list published by the Registrar of this Court.

(3.) Many submissions were made to us by Mr. Gopaliah appearing for the petitioner. The first was that the Central Government accorded him no opportunity to make his representations affainst the equivalence of posts deduced by the Central Government on which it based its final inter-State seniority list. The second submission was that the four principles which were evolved by the Government of India at the conference of Chief Secretaries for determining the equation of posts did not form the foundation of the equivalence deduced bv the Central Government or the rank assigned to the petitioner. The third submission was that the Central Government depended entirely upon one of the four criteria which had to be applied and that the application of that criterion in isolation had produced an inaccurate decision with respect to equivalence. The fourth submission was that the Central Government depended substantially upon the fact that the post of a second division clerk of the District Court which the petitioner held at one stage was in a cadre different from the cadre to which the post of a second division clerk in the High Court belonged and that dependence upon that factor was not permissible.