Take the compassionate job and the door closes — you cannot come back later for a better post

A Tribunal had allowed dependants who joined on one post to seek appointment on a higher one. The Karnataka High Court quashes those orders, on a rule the Supreme Court settled for exactly this situation.

Compassionate appointment exists to meet an emergency. When a government servant dies in harness, a dependant is offered a job so the family does not fall into destitution. On 22 September 2026 a Bench of Justice M. Nagaprasanna and Justice Hema Kulkarni held that once that offer is accepted and the dependant joins, the entitlement is spent.

Both writ petitions filed by the State were allowed, and the orders of the Karnataka State Administrative Tribunal of March 2026 in two applications were quashed.

The two applications the Tribunal allowed had produced orders the State regarded as opening a category of claim the law had closed, which is why it litigated a matter affecting two individual appointments.

What had happened

After the death of the employees in service, dependent family members were offered appointment to a post for which an application had been made. They joined on that post without raising any objection.

The significance of that, the judgment records, is that the financial crisis of the family was over — one of the dependants of the deceased had been offered appointment on compassionate basis in terms of the policy existing when the application was considered.

What followed was a claim for something more: that having been appointed on compassionate basis, the dependant could ask the employer to appoint him to a higher post. The Tribunal accepted that; the State came to the High Court.

The two applications before the Tribunal were numbered 10758 and 10759 of 2024, and were decided together — the same claim advanced by two dependants in the same terms.

The settled rule

The law on the issue, the Bench says, is well settled, and it turns on whether a second option can be exercised once the first has been taken.

The governing authority is State of Rajasthan v. Umrao Singh, whose facts map onto these almost exactly. The deceased there had been a Sub-Inspector in the CID. On his death an application for compassionate appointment was made, and the dependant was offered the post of Lower Division Clerk. He accepted it and joined. Later he asked for his case to be considered for appointment as Sub-Inspector, on the footing that he was eligible for it.

The Supreme Court rejected the claim, holding that once the right to be considered for a compassionate post has been exercised, it is exhausted.

The principle is not confined to Rajasthan or to police posts. It applies wherever a scheme offers a dependant a post and the dependant takes it: the offer, once accepted, discharges the employer's obligation under the scheme.

In Umrao Singh the gap between the post offered and the post sought was wide — a clerical post against the rank the deceased had held — and the claim was made after the dependant had joined and drawn salary. The Court treated the acceptance as decisive rather than the difference in grade.

Why the rule is strict

The reasoning behind it is bound up with why compassionate appointment is permitted at all.

Appointment on compassionate grounds is an exception to the constitutional guarantee of equality of opportunity in public employment. It is tolerated because of the immediacy of the family’s need, and it is confined to what that need requires. It is not an inherited claim on a particular grade of post, and it is not a route by which a family member may enter service and then be regraded to the position the deceased held.

Once the dependant has a job and a salary, the emergency that justified the exception has passed. A second application, made years later for a better post, is no longer an answer to destitution; it is an ordinary claim for promotion or fresh appointment, and it has to be made through the ordinary channels open to everyone else.

The rule also protects those channels. Every compassionate appointment to a higher post is a post not filled by open competition, and the wider the exception is read, the more it eats into the general rule.

It follows that the moment of choice matters enormously to the family. A dependant who believes he is qualified for a higher post must say so before accepting the post offered, because acceptance is treated as the exercise of the option rather than as an interim arrangement pending something better.

The Tribunal's contrary view is not hard to sympathise with on the facts of an individual case, where a qualified dependant sits in a post below his education. But a Tribunal cannot create an entitlement the statute and the scheme do not confer, and that is the ground on which its orders were set aside.

The order

Both writ petitions were allowed. The impugned orders of the Tribunal at Belagavi in the two applications were quashed.

Nothing in the judgment disturbs the appointments themselves. The men remain in the posts they were given, with the service and the salary that go with them.

The dependants keep the appointments they accepted. What they lose is the Tribunal’s direction opening a second consideration for a higher post — a direction the Bench held the law does not permit.