Promotee or direct recruit stopped mattering once they were all Senior Accountants, and the pay gap that opened afterwards has to be closed

Chief Justice Ravindra V. Ghuge and Justice Om Narayan Rai dismissed six writ petitions by the Department of Posts, holding the anomaly came from an ACP upgradation and not from the mode of recruitment.

Six writ petitions by the Union of India, the General Manager (Postal Accounts and Finance) of the West Bengal Postal Circle and the Senior Accounts Officer (Postal), Kolkata, challenged orders of the Central Administrative Tribunal dated 23 March 2026 which had corrected a pay anomaly in the postal accounts cadre. The respondents are retired officers, most of them described in the cause titles as around sixty-nine years of age, who had worked as Assistant Accounts Officers at Yogayog Bhawan, Kolkata. On 14 October 2026 all six petitions were dismissed.

Where the gap came from

The structure of the dispute is familiar in cadres where a grade is filled from two directions. The original applicants before the Tribunal had reached the post of Senior Accountant by promotion from a different feeder post. The private respondent reached the same post by direct recruitment.

The disparity in pay did not arise at that point. It arose later, when financial upgradation was granted under the Assured Career Progression Scheme to the private respondent at a time when both the original applicants and he had already been promoted to the post of Senior Accountant — that is, when they were in the same post.

The anomaly was then eclipsed for a period, because the original applicants obtained the benefit of the third MACP Scheme. But the moment the private respondent also received that benefit, the gap became visible again. The Court held it was therefore clearly attributable to the grant of benefits under the ACP Scheme, and so covered by the Supreme Court's decision in C.R. Madhava Murthy.

“The service birthmark”

The Department's central answer was that the private respondent had been directly recruited to the post, and that this difference in origin justified the difference in pay.

The Bench held it would make no difference in this case, in a phrase worth preserving: the service birthmark got effectively erased by the time the pay anomaly occurred. The pay disparity did not occur because of the private respondent's direct recruitment. It occurred on the grant of financial upgradation under the ACP Scheme after both sides had been promoted to Senior Accountant.

The Court added that even otherwise the facts of C.R. Madhava Murthy are substantially similar: there too the original writ petitioners were promotees from a different feeder post while the private respondent was a direct recruit to the promotional post.

The two subsidiary grounds

The Department relied on a Department of Personnel and Training office memorandum of 9 August 1999 to say that no benefit under the ACP Scheme could have been granted to the original applicants because they had already had two regular promotions.

That could not salvage the case, the Court held, for the simple reason that the original applicants do not claim any additional financial benefit under the ACP Scheme. Their grievance is not that they were denied an upgradation; it is that an upgradation given to a colleague in the same post left them behind in pay.

The second ground was that the original applicants had since been further promoted to the post of Assistant Accounts Officer while the private respondent was drawing higher pay by reason of the third MACP Scheme. That also failed to prop up the case, for the reason already given: the anomaly traces back to the ACP grant made when all of them held the same post, and the later promotions do not change its source.

Delay

The ground of delay was described as “unimpressive”, and the Court gave three reasons.

The original applicants had all along been pursuing their claims, as the Tribunal's own orders record, and they approached the Tribunal immediately after the General Manager decided against them. They have since retired on superannuation. And the anomaly clearly affects their pensionary benefits, so the cause still continues.

For the law the Bench relied on M.R. Gupta and Tarsem Singh: where an issue relates to payment or re-fixation of pay or pension, relief may be granted in spite of delay, because it does not affect the rights of third parties. That is the distinction that matters in service litigation — a stale claim to a post displaces somebody who holds it, whereas a stale claim to correctly fixed pay displaces nobody.

The order

For all those reasons the Court held that the orders passed by the Tribunal on 23 March 2026 called for no interference. All six writ petitions were dismissed with no costs, and rule was made absolute. Urgent certified photocopies of the judgment were directed to be supplied on an urgent basis on completion of the necessary formalities.

The practical consequence is that a pay anomaly which opened up between colleagues holding the same post, was briefly hidden by a later scheme and then reappeared, must be corrected for men who have now been retired for some years and whose pensions were calculated on the lower figure.