MADAN MOHAN GOEL Vs. STATE OF HARYANA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) IN the year 1971 the Haryana Public Service Commission, through their advertisement No. R.G. 313/69 (hereinafter referred to as the advertisement), invited applications from persons desirous of being appointed to a temporary post of Chief Electrical Inspector in the Irrigation and Power Department of the Government of Haryana. Paragraphs 4 and 5 of the advertisement stated:

(2.) THE Petitioner, who was then serving the Haryana State Electricity Board as an Executive Engineer, applied for the job, was selected for the same and was appointed thereto through a letter dated the 19th of November, 1971 (hereinafter called 'the appointment letter') which made no reference to the advertisement or to any of its contents and, on the other hand, detailed the terms and conditions on which the appointment was being made. The tenure of the post was thus described in paragraph 1 of the appointment letter:

(3.) THE main point stressed by learned Counsel for the Petitioner before us is that the contents of the advertisement did not form a part of the appointment letter, that the terms and conditions of service by which the Petitioner was governed were comprehensively laid down in the appointment letter independently of the advertisement, that they did not envisage any period of probation which, the Petitioner had to go through and that, therefore, his services were liable to termination only on the Government giving him a month's notice which had admittedly not been given. After hearing learned Counsel for the parties, we find the contention to be unexceptionable. As already stated, the appointment letter did not make any reference at all to the advertisement. It also did not advert to any period of probation such as was mentioned in the advertisement. On the other hand, it stated in explicit terms that the Petitioner was being offered the post of Chief Electrical Inspector "on the following terms and conditions of service". Had a period of probation been envisaged for the Petitioner in the new post, there is no reason why the same would not have been specifically mentioned in the appointment letter just as other conditions of service like the pay scale which appeared in the advertisement were repeated in the appointment letter. In our opinion, the appointment letter contained a comprehensive statement of the terms and conditions of the service of the Petitioner and, in the circumstances of the case, the advertisement cannot be regarded as a part thereof. In this connection we may also note that the giving of a month's notice on either side would normally be a condition which would rule out a period of probation to be undergone by the appointee. This is not to say that the period of probation and a notice of the type mentioned cannot co -exist, but if that is what is intended, it must be made specific mention of. The learned Single Judge who acted upon the advertisement in holding that the Petitioner had not satisfactorily completed the period of his probation, took the advertisement for granted as a document governing the conditions of the service of the Petitioner without deciding that the appointment letter was issued subject to its contents and that is the error into which, in our opinion, he fell. In this connection he appears to have been influenced mainly by the fact that both the Petitioner and the State Government had in the correspondence which took place between them subsequent to the Petitioner's appointment, been referring to him as being on probation but that fact is irrelevant to the determination of the question whether the Petitioner actually was on probation which is a matter of interpretation of the appointment letter, and of such interpretation only, so that although antecedent circumstances may perhaps throw light on the intention of the parties, subsequent events would not be germane to the issue.