D N AGRAWAL Vs. STATE OF M P

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE petitioners, employed as Assistant Engineers under the respondent No. 1 in their Public Works Department, feel aggrieved by fixation of their seniority in the cadre vis-a-vis the respondent Nos. 2 to 78 and seek a writ of certiorari for quashing the seniority list (Annexure-P-10) by filing this writ petition under Article 226 of the Constitution of India.

(2.) WE begin examination of the petitioners' grievances with a note of distress at the manner in which their learned counsel made his oral submissions for a little over six hours extended over three days and repeated the same submission over and over again without any concern for others waiting for their turn and without even pausing to consider advisability of such a move. Should the lawyers be brief, to the point and luminously limited in citations or unfold aggressive orality, punctuated by irrelevant and unnecessary case-law in the question which we would like to present for consideration of the Bar. Though we do not claim perfect knowledge of law and would love to be educated, we found the advocacy nothing but a wasteful lullaby and were compelled to stop it even at the cost of annoyance of the' learned counsel. It must be realised that judges, in present context of long pendency of cases and their sense of urgency to decide them, cannot permit argumentum ad libitem by unnatural extension of audi alteram partem. We do not wish to belong to the category to Judges who allow

(3.) THE petitioners claim that they are senior to the respondents and should have been shown as such in the seniority list. Their claim is based on their submission that ad hoc service rendered by them between 22-7-1971 when they were first appointed (Annexure-P-3) and 22-11-1972 when they were regularly appointed after selection (Annexure-P-6), should also have been counted for purposes of their seniority in the cadre in view of decisions of the Supreme Court in Baleshwar Dass v. State of U. P. (AIR 1981 SC. 41) and G. P. Doval v. Chief Secy. Govt. of UP. (AIR 1984 S. C. 1527 ). They, in the alternative, claim that their seniority vis-a-vis respondents 16 to 53, could not have been fixed above them by giving weightage of experience as overseer. For these very reasons, the petitioners claim that final seniority list is illegal and should be quashed. The respondents have resisted this claim and have submitted that the seniority has been fixed as per rule and is otherwise correct. They also submit that petitioners cannot claim any advantage of their ad hoc service as they were not selected on merits for the said purpose and were ineligible for such consideration at that time.