The State may correct an illegality. It may not manufacture one by administrative presumption

A question in the Legislative Assembly produced four reports and two orders against fifteen teachers the government had approved and paid for years. The Allahabad High Court sets them aside and says any fresh inquiry cannot begin with the answer already written.

Governments revisit their own decisions, and they should be able to. An appointment approved years ago may turn out to have been irregular, and nothing prevents a State from saying so. What it cannot do, on this judgment, is reverse itself without explaining the reversal, and then visit the consequences on the individuals who relied on the original decision.

On 25 September 2026 Justice Manju Rani Chauhan set aside four enquiry reports and the orders founded on them, in a judgment notable less for its result than for the standard it sets for the inquiry that may follow.

Fifteen teachers

The petitioners are fifteen Assistant Teachers appointed by the Committees of Management of non-government private institutions. They challenged two orders of 29 July 2025 passed by the Additional Chief Secretary, Department of Social Welfare, and sought to restrain the respondents from interfering with their functioning and to secure payment of salary as it fell due.

They also assailed four reports submitted by the District Basic Education Officer, Mau — dated 25 April, 13 June, 17 June and 23 June 2025 — and consequential orders of 18 July 2025 and 12 December 2025.

The record the Court had to weigh was contradictory in an unusual way, and the contradictions were the State's own.

There had been an earlier departmental inquiry, reporting on 28 November 2018, and a government order of 24 July 2019 acting on it. There were orders of the High Court. There were criminal proceedings. The petitioners had continued in service for years pursuant to the government's own approvals, with financial sanction. Departmental authorities had taken divergent stands on whether the appointments were approved, and a departmental statement in other proceedings supported the petitioners. The contemporaneous official records were themselves disputed.

Against that, a question raised in the Legislative Assembly had prompted fresh directions, and the 2025 reports reached adverse conclusions.

The principles, stated as a hierarchy

The passage that will be quoted from this judgment sets out how competing materials of that kind are to be ranked. The controversy, the Court held, must be determined not by the chronology of allegations but by the hierarchy of proof.

That a question was raised in the Legislative Assembly justifies inquiry. That an earlier inquiry was conducted requires consideration of its findings. That the State earlier left the appointments undisturbed requires explanation before a contrary position is adopted. That departmental authorities have taken divergent stands on approval requires resolution. The existence of contemporaneous official records requires verification. An allegation of fraud requires particular proof. And the imposition of civil consequences requires procedural fairness.

Applied cumulatively, the Court held the conclusion unavoidable that the petitioners could not presently be condemned on the existing adverse reports alone.

It was equally clear about the limits of its own role. Judicial review does not ordinarily substitute a court's assessment of disputed facts for that of the competent administrative authority, and the Court was not proposing to conduct the factual inquiry itself. Its intervention was warranted because the foundation on which grave adverse consequences had been imposed did not disclose the degree of procedural fairness, evidentiary scrutiny and legal clarity such a determination requires.

Consistency, and the duty to explain

The judgment's treatment of administrative reversal is its most portable contribution.

Administrative consistency, the Court said, is not synonymous with administrative inflexibility. The State may change its position where law and facts warrant it. What the Constitution does not countenance is an unexplained inconsistency which visits individuals with serious civil consequences while leaving the State's own contradictory positions and records unresolved.

It put the same point in terms of equity. The petitioners are entitled not to an equitable dispensation from the law but to an equitable application of public power. A person who has remained in service for years under the sanction and supervision of the State is entitled to expect that any attempt to undo that position will rest on something more substantial than an unexplained administrative reversal.

And then the formulation that gives the judgment its title: the State must be permitted to correct illegality, but not to manufacture illegality by administrative presumption. It may revisit the past, but with the discipline of law. It may disagree with its earlier conclusion, but it must disclose why. It may reopen an inquiry, but it cannot reopen the matter with the answer already written.

What a fresh inquiry must look like

Rather than foreclose the State, the Court set the terms on which it may proceed — and those terms are the operative part of the judgment for anyone facing a similar exercise.

The respondents remain at liberty to undertake a fresh or further inquiry strictly in accordance with law and within the parameters of the government's directions. But such an inquiry is not to be understood as an exercise to vindicate a pre-existing conclusion. It must be an open factual determination in which, in the Court's phrase, the evidence is permitted to dictate the conclusion rather than the conclusion dictate the selection of evidence.

The competent authority must consider the earlier inquiry report of 28 November 2018, the government order of 24 July 2019, the relevant orders of the High Court, the documentary material relied on by the petitioners and the managements, the records relating to approval and financial sanction, the departmental statement made in the other proceeding, and the subsequent material relied on by the respondents.

The outcome may go either way, and the Court said so in terms. If an appointment is found contrary to a mandatory statutory provision, or is established to have been procured by fraud or misrepresentation attributable to the particular petitioner, appropriate consequences may follow. Conversely, if the records establish that the appointment was duly processed and approved under the legal regime applicable at the time, it cannot be displaced merely because a later departmental authority has taken a contrary view.

The order

The four reports of 2025 and the consequential order of 18 July 2025, insofar as they record adverse conclusions without those safeguards, were set aside, and the consequential action founded exclusively on them quashed.

Until a fresh exercise is completed and a final reasoned decision taken, the petitioners are not to be treated as having been removed from service merely on the strength of the impugned reports. Their claim for salary for the period during which they actually discharged their duties is to be reconsidered by the competent authority under the applicable statutory and financial framework, uninfluenced by the findings set aside.

The writ petition was allowed in those terms, with no order as to costs.

The balance the Court struck is worth noting for what it refuses to do. It does not hold the appointments valid — the contradictions in the record are real, and some of them may resolve against the teachers. It does not stop the State from investigating a matter raised in the Assembly. What it does is insist that fifteen people who have taught for years on the State's own approval cannot be removed by reports that reach a conclusion the record does not yet support, and that if the State wants that conclusion it must earn it in an inquiry conducted in the ordinary way.