Public Authority Cannot Settle Service Tenure By Hindsight: Delhi High Court Directs Delhi University To Treat Professor As Retired With Consequential Benefits
The Court held that contractual engagement cannot be created retrospectively by unilateral office order after service period has ended; recovery impermissible where no fraud or misrepresentation by employee.
Justice Sanjeev Narula, Delhi High Court
The Delhi High Court has held that a public authority cannot settle service tenure by hindsight, and that a University which accepted an employee's service for years, paid her salary as Director, issued her an identity card recording her retirement date, and informed the UGC that she would retire at 65, cannot thereafter retrospectively declare that she had already retired five years earlier and recast the intervening period as contractual engagement.
The Court found no fraud, misrepresentation, or suppression by the petitioner, observing that the University itself passed Resolution No. 126, paid her salary, and informed the UGC that she would retire on April 30, 2017. The Court further held that a contractual engagement cannot be created retrospectively by a unilateral office order after the service period has ended.
Justice Sanjeev Narula allowing a writ petition filed by Dr. Asha Gupta, former Director of the Directorate of Hindi Medium Implementation, University of Delhi, observed, “A public authority cannot settle service tenure by hindsight. If the University considered that the Petitioner was required to retire on attaining the age of 60 years, it had to say so before that date, or at least when that date arrived, after giving her a fair opportunity to meet the proposed action”.
“What it could not do was accept the Petitioner’s service for years, pay her as Director, and then retrospectively deny that the same period counted as regular service. That course ignored her reliance on Resolution No. 126, recast completed service by hindsight, and was manifestly arbitrary. It therefore offended Article 14”, the Bench further observed.
Advocate Anil Nauriya appeared for the petitioner and Advocate Mohinder J.S. Rupal appeared for the respondent.
The petitioner was a Reader in Bharati College before being appointed Director of DHMI in 2007. Before joining DHMI, she sought clarification from the University about her retirement age since teachers at that time were entitled to retire at 65 years.
The University's Executive Council passed a resolution on December 27, 2007, treating the post of Director DHMI as a teaching post for the purpose of age of retirement "since the present incumbent is from the teaching fraternity".
This Resolution was communicated to her while her one-year lien at Bharati College was still subsisting. Acting on this assurance, she allowed her lien to lapse and did not return to Bharati College.
The University then sought UGC approval in 2013, and the UGC in February 2014 disapproved, stating DHMI staff were not recognised as teachers. Using this communication, the University in March 2017 withdrew its Resolution by a fresh Executive Council resolution and declared her retired as of April 30, 2012, nearly five years retrospectively. It then fixed a notional contractual fee for the period 2012 to 2017 and claimed recovery of Rs. 38.90 lakhs as excess payment.
The Court held that the Resolution was a case-specific personal protection, not a general declaration about the DHMI cadre, as evidenced by the words "since the present incumbent is from the teaching fraternity".
The Court applied the doctrine of promissory estoppel in public law, holding that where a public authority makes a clear representation within the field of its authority and a person acts on it to her prejudice, the authority cannot ordinarily resile merely because the representation later appears inconvenient.
“The Respondents’ emphasis on the Petitioner not being a teacher for all purposes does not advance their case. That contention may answer a claim for general cadre parity; it does not answer a claim founded on a specific assurance extended before her lien expired”, the Bench observed.
“…approach fails at the threshold. A contractual engagement cannot be created retrospectively by a unilateral office order after the service period has ended. The Petitioner was not offered contractual engagement in 2012, did not accept contractual remuneration, and worked without any contemporaneous fixation of a monthly fee. The University cannot, in 2019, impose a contractual character on service rendered between 2012 and 2017 and use that post facto characterisation to create a monetary liability. Nor was the Petitioner’s service during this period unauthorised in any real sense. She worked under the University’s own administrative arrangement, was paid by it, and was treated as Director, DHMI. The University cannot convert that course of conduct into a charge of excess payment against the employee who acted under it”, the Bench further said.
The University was directed to treat the petitioner as having retired on 30 April 2017, recompute all retiral benefits accordingly, release all withheld salary and dues with 9 percent interest, and not recover any amount based on the impugned contractual fee fixation.
However, the Court clarified that the ruling is case-specific: only the petitioner was entitled to retirement at 65 years because she relied on Executive Council Resolution No. 126, and the University could not retrospectively withdraw that protection; the judgment does not confer the same benefit on all DHMI employees.
Cause Title: Dr. Asha Gupta v. University of Delhi and Anr. (Neutral Citation: 2026:DHC:5262)
Appearances:
Petitioner: Anil Nauriya, Sumita Hazarika, Prakhar Gupta, Advocates.
Respondent: Mohinder J.S. Rupal, Ravinder Agarwal, Manish Kumar Singh, Vasu Agarwal, Advocates.