Orissa HC tells Odisha Grameen Bank to frame scheme to regularise temporary sweepers and messengers
Justice Biraja Prasanna Satapathy quashed the 2019 order by which the bank rejected the claim of its temporary drivers, sweepers, messengers and IT workers, and gave it four months to frame a scheme on the lines of the one Andhra Pradesh Grameena Vikas Bank adopted after its own staff won in the Andhra Pradesh High Court and the Supreme Court. Regularisation is to follow in due course and by seniority.
Temporary workers who have kept the branches of Odisha Grameen Bank swept, its post carried and its computers running, some of them under the cover of interim orders since 2019, have won a direction that the bank frame a scheme to regularise them. On 28 October 2026 Justice Biraja Prasanna Satapathy of the Orissa High Court disposed of four writ petitions led by Apurba Ranjan Mohanty v. Odisha Grameen Bank, quashed the bank’s common rejection order of 27 May 2019, and directed it to complete the scheme within four months of receiving the order, taking as its model the scheme framed by Andhra Pradesh Grameena Vikas Bank after a similar claim by its own sweepers, attenders and messengers was upheld all the way to the Supreme Court.
Hired by branch managers, paid from sundry accounts, never appointed
The petitioners were engaged on a temporary basis as drivers, sweepers, messengers, DTP operators, an IT electrician and IT networking and hardware workers in various branches of what was then Odisha Gramya Bank, a regional rural bank with 500 branches across the State. By their own account, recruitment of officers and employees in regional rural banks is governed by the Regional Rural Banks (Appointment and Promotion of Officers and Other Employees) Rules, 1987, but sweepers and messengers were never taken on under those rules. They were brought in through a contractor or service provider, or at the pleasure of the branch manager, and allowed to continue. The bank’s counsel, Kailash Chandra Kanungo, added that they work part-time and are paid by the branch out of its sundry account.
The claim rests on an award that predates most of the petitioners’ engagements. When workers’ unions in regional rural banks approached the Supreme Court seeking regularisation of temporary sweepers and messengers and pay parity with the sponsor banks, the Court directed the Central Government to constitute a National Industrial Tribunal, which was chaired by Justice S. Obul Reddy, a former Chief Justice of the Andhra Pradesh High Court. The Tribunal’s award of 30 April 1990 held, at paragraph 4.410, that part-time sweepers-cum-messengers paid daily wages or a fraction of a regular messenger’s salary were entitled to equal pay and all other benefits admissible to regularly appointed full-time messengers, that the absence of a sanctioned post was irrelevant where managements had extracted full-time work from so-called part-timers, and that the Government or the banks could sanction the posts needed to accommodate them. The operative sentence read:
Their services shall be regularized with effect from the date of their continuous engagement
That award has been applied in other States. Sweepers and messengers of Cauvery Grameen Bank won regularisation from their initial engagement in the Karnataka High Court on 3 March 2006, confirmed in Writ Appeal No. 630 of 2006 on a compromise recorded on 27 July 2006. The Andhra Pradesh High Court allowed the claim of Chaitanya Godavari Grameena Bank’s staff in W.P. No. 24779 of 2011 on 27 December 2017, and that order was implemented. Following it, sweepers, attenders and messengers of Andhra Pradesh Grameena Vikas Bank succeeded in W.P. No. 15284 of 2014 and connected petitions on 9 January 2020; the bank’s appeals, W.A. No. 147 of 2021 and batch, were dismissed on 25 April 2022, and its Special Leave Petition (Civil) No. 12973 of 2022 was dismissed by the Supreme Court on 22 August 2022. The Chhattisgarh High Court directed Chhattisgarh Rajya Grameen Bank to frame a regularisation scheme for its daily-wage employees in W.P. No. 4092 of 2019 and batch on 22 August 2022, and the Tripura High Court allowed a similar claim in W.P. No. 321 of 2020 on 16 August 2022.
A 2019 direction to consider, and a rejection that cited Uma Devi
The Odisha workers first moved the High Court in W.P.(C) No. 3325 of 2019. On 14 February 2019 the court disposed of that petition by allowing them to make a representation to the bank and directing the bank to decide it in the light of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Secretary, State of Karnataka v. Uma Devi, State of Karnataka v. M.L. Kesari and Amarkant Rai, and the Andhra Pradesh High Court judgment. They made a common representation on 7 March 2019. By a common order of 27 May 2019 the bank rejected it on two grounds: the petitioners had never been engaged by any letter of appointment or under any notification issued by the bank, and their case was not covered by Uma Devi or by the Andhra Pradesh judgment as confirmed by the Supreme Court. Four writ petitions followed, and interim orders in each have kept the petitioners at work since.
Ms B. Senapati, for the petitioners, argued that they are in the same position as the workers who succeeded in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Tripura, that the bank had rejected their claim without properly appreciating Uma Devi or the Andhra Pradesh decision, and that the court should quash the rejection and direct the bank to frame a scheme and regularise them in due course, with the interim orders continuing until then. The judgment sets out the passages she relied on: paragraph 44 of Uma Devi, which carves out a one-time regularisation for irregularly appointed employees who have worked ten years or more on sanctioned posts without the cover of court orders; paragraphs 8 and 13 of M.L. Kesari, which treat that exercise as a duty and require employees omitted because of pending litigation to be considered in continuation of it; and Amarkant Rai, in which a college night guard engaged by a Principal without authority was held to be irregularly rather than illegally appointed and was regularised retrospectively after 29 years.
Mr Kanungo took the opposite view of the same authorities. The petitions, he said, were not maintainable: most of the petitioners had claimed regularisation after only two to five years of temporary work, well short of the ten years Uma Devi contemplates, and they were now continuing only because of the interim orders, which is precisely the litigious employment that judgment excludes. A similar claim by other employees in Himansu Parida v. Union of India, W.P.(C) No. 1276 of 2014, had not been entertained by the Orissa High Court in 2024, which had sent those petitioners to the Industrial Tribunal and observed that long temporary service confers no right to absorption where the posts are not sanctioned, however perennial the work. The petitioners had been taken on without any notification or selection, so their engagements were illegal rather than irregular. The Regional Rural Banks (Appointment and Promotion of Officers and Employees) Rules of 2010 and 2017 contain no post of driver, sweeper, messenger, DTP operator, IT electrician or IT networking and hardware worker, so there was nothing to regularise them against. He relied on paragraphs 37, 43 and 53 of Uma Devi, on Nanda Kumar v. State of Bihar, Civil Appeal No. 2835 of 2014, decided on 25 February 2014, on Upendra Singh v. State of Bihar, Civil Appeal No. 2356 of 2018, decided on 23 February 2018, and on Vibhuti Shankar Pandey v. State of Madhya Pradesh, Civil Appeal No. 916 of 2023, decided on 8 February 2023, each of which refused regularisation to daily-wagers or temporary hands not appointed by a competent authority against a sanctioned post.
The newer Supreme Court line: Jaggo, Shripal, Dharam Singh, Bhola Nath, Sukhendu Bhattacharjee
In reply, the petitioners invoked the Supreme Court’s recent run of decisions on long-serving temporary staff, and the judgment reproduces them at length. Jaggo v. Union of India, 2024 SCC OnLine SC 3826, describes the misuse of temporary labels for work that is essential, recurring and integral to an institution, arbitrary termination, the denial of career progression, outsourcing used as a shield, and the denial of pension, provident fund and leave to people whose tenure spans decades, and says government institutions must lead by example in providing fair and stable employment. Shripal v. Nagar Nigam, Ghaziabad, 2025 SCC OnLine SC 221, directed a municipal employer to regularise workmen within six months without retroactively imposing educational or procedural criteria, holding that:
Uma Devi cannot serve as a shield to justify exploitative engagements
Dharam Singh v. State of U.P., Civil Appeal No. 8558 of 2018, went further, quashing the State’s refusal to sanction Class III and Class IV posts for perennial work, ordering supernumerary posts, regularisation from 2002 with arrears carrying six per cent compound interest on default, and a compliance affidavit within four months; it described the State as a constitutional employer that cannot balance budgets on the backs of those who perform its most basic functions, and said that interim protection neither creates rights nor erases entitlements. Bhola Nath v. State of Jharkhand, 2026 INSC 99, held that contractual labels cannot immunise arbitrary State action and directed immediate regularisation of employees kept on sanctioned posts for over a decade under contractual nomenclature. Sukhendu Bhattacharjee v. State of Assam, 2026 INSC 523, rejected the proposition that Uma Devi bars regularisation of anyone not appointed to a sanctioned post, restored a Single Judge’s order and directed that muster-roll workers be regularised under a 2005 Cabinet decision that had already covered nearly 30,000 others, with supernumerary posts created where necessary and the whole exercise, arrears included, completed within a year.
Four short paragraphs of reasoning, and a scheme to be copied
The court’s own analysis is brief. Justice Satapathy found that all the petitioners had been engaged in different branches of the bank at different times and in different capacities. He found that the question of temporary sweepers and messengers in regional rural banks had gone to the Supreme Court, that the National Industrial Tribunal constituted on its direction had by its award of 30 April 1990 required such temporary or part-time sweeper-cum-messengers to be regularised from the date of their initial continuance, and that the Andhra Pradesh High Court had applied the award in W.P. No. 24779 of 2011, an order that was implemented, and again in the W.P. No. 15284 of 2014 batch, an order that survived both the writ appeal and the Supreme Court. He recorded that when the petitioners, relying on those decisions, raised their claim under the High Court’s 2019 direction, the bank rejected it on the ground that they had been engaged without due procedure and fell outside Uma Devi.
Taking into account the nature of the Tribunal’s award and the decisions of the Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Tripura High Courts on record, the judge held that the bank is required to frame a scheme for the regularisation of the petitioners, who continue as sweepers, messengers and in other work on a temporary basis, and that on the framing of the scheme their services should be regularised against those posts or posts of a similar nature in due course. The judgment does not separately address the bank’s arguments that the posts do not exist under the 2010 and 2017 Rules, that the petitioners work part-time out of sundry accounts, that most had served only two to five years when they claimed, or that their continuance rests on interim orders; it records those submissions and the authorities on both sides and moves directly to the direction.
Order
Odisha Grameen Bank was directed to complete the exercise of framing a scheme, in the light of the scheme framed by Andhra Pradesh Grameena Vikas Bank, within four months of receiving the order. On the framing of the scheme, the petitioners’ services are to be regularised in due course, with due regard to seniority. The bank’s common order of 27 May 2019 rejecting their representation was quashed. W.P.(C) Nos. 19736, 19730, 19734 and 19737 of 2019 were disposed of, with a copy of the order to be placed in each connected case. The matter was heard on 17 September 2026 in hybrid mode and decided on 28 October 2026.