He taught for nearly fifty years on an approval order the department says it never issued
An earlier order in his favour had become final. The Allahabad High Court holds that finality does not authenticate a forged document, or create a post that never existed.
Salary from a State exchequer is not payment for work done. It follows from a lawful appointment against a duly sanctioned post — which is why a person may work in an institution for decades and still have no enforceable claim to be paid by the government.
On 25 September 2026 the Allahabad High Court applied that principle to a teacher whose service went back to 1977, in a judgment marked for reporting.
The claim
The petitioner said he had been appointed in the institution with effect from 1 July 1977, had joined pursuant to an appointment letter, and had continuously discharged his duties ever since. He is, admittedly, the senior-most teacher there.
The Committee of Management had, on his case, forwarded the complete records of his selection and appointment along with those of other teaching and non-teaching staff, and an order of 29 July 1982 had approved the appointments.
That 1982 approval order is the foundation of everything he claimed.
The writ petition sought quashing of an order of 2 June 2015 rejecting his claim.
The inquiry this Court had directed
The petitioner's stronger argument was not about the merits but about finality. An earlier order of 9 March 2000 had gone in his favour, and had not been challenged. On his case, the 2015 order amounted to an impermissible administrative review of a concluded matter.
The Court rejected that characterisation, and its reasoning turns on where the 2015 order came from.
The High Court had itself directed a fresh examination of the underlying record, and that direction, the judgment holds, constituted the governing procedural mandate for the subsequent decision-making. The authority was required to examine the original record afresh and was not confined to perpetuating the earlier administrative conclusion. The petitioner was given the opportunity the Court had directed, the material was examined, and the impugned order followed.
So the 2015 order was not a unilateral reopening. It was the result of the reconsideration this Court had ordered.
What the record showed
On that examination, the approval order of 29 July 1982 — on which the claim substantially rests — was found not to be supported by the authentic departmental record, and was found to be forged.
The Court recorded what the petitioner had not done about that finding. He placed before it no contemporaneous and unimpeachable material sufficient to dislodge it. Nor did he show that the authority's conclusion rested on irrelevant considerations, ignored relevant material, or was perverse in the legal sense — which are the grounds on which a writ court can interfere with a factual determination of this kind.
The judgment also records the procedural history that led there: records called for and produced by the Principal, an examination by the authority, and a finding that the papers relating to regularisation were not available in the department's own office.
What finality does and does not do
The most quotable passage addresses the argument from the 2000 order directly, and states the limits of finality with precision.
Finality prevents an administrative order from being casually ignored or reopened at will. It does not, however, create a sanctioned post where none is established, authenticate a document subsequently found to be forged, or preclude an authority from undertaking an inquiry which the Court itself has expressly directed.
The earlier order therefore remains relevant as part of the historical record, but it cannot furnish an independent and indefeasible source of entitlement once the foundational basis of the claim has failed on the record-based inquiry the Court mandated.
That distinction is worth holding on to, because arguments from finality in service matters are usually put at a higher level than they can bear. An unchallenged order binds the parties on what it decided. It does not convert a document into a genuine one, or bring a post into existence.
Salary, and the limits of working
The Court applied the same reasoning specifically to the claim for pay. The right to draw salary from the State exchequer ordinarily follows from a lawful appointment against a duly sanctioned post. It cannot be founded solely on actual working.
That is the hardest part of the judgment, and the Court does not soften it. A person may have taught in a school for decades, in good faith, and still have no claim on the public purse if no sanctioned post existed and the approval he relies on was not genuine.
The writ petition was dismissed, with no order as to costs.
The unanswered question
What the judgment does not address — because it was not asked to — is who created the 1982 document, and how a teacher came to work for nearly half a century on the strength of it. The finding of forgery is made against the document, not against the petitioner, and the record as described suggests he may have been its recipient rather than its author.
That is cold comfort to a man who has now been told, at the end of a working life, that the appointment he relied on never existed in law. But the alternative the Court declined to adopt would have been to let a forged approval create a permanent charge on the exchequer, and the reasons it gives for refusing that are difficult to argue with.