Case: State Of Tamilnadu  Vs. M.R. Alagappan

The State of Tamil Nadu and Director of Agriculture, Madras as common appellants have brought in challenge a common judgment rendered by Tamil Nadu Administrative Tribunal in two Original Applications filed by the contesting respondents who are working as Deputy Agricultural Officers in the Tamil Nadu Agricultural Extension Subordinate Service under the Agricultural Department of the said State. The Tribunal by its impugned common judgment in these two original applications has taken the view that the contesting respondents are entitled to get the same pay scale as available to Agricultural Officers working in Tamil Nadu Agricultural Extension Service as according to the Tribunal both these categories of employees perform the same type of work and carry out the same type of duties. Consequently on the principle of Equal Pay for Equal Work the appellant-State must maintain parity of pay scales between these two groups of employees working in its Agricultural Department. The Tribunal has also directed that the contesting respondents be paid all arrears with effect from 1st June, 1988.2. On grant of special leave to appeal under Article 136 of the Constitution of India the appellants have preferred these appeals. During the pendency of these appeals by an interim order of this Court the impugned judgment and order of the Tribunal have remained stayed. In order to appreciate the grievance of the respondents which appealed to the Tribunal, it is necessary to note a few introductory facts leading to these proceedings.3. The respondents herein were originally appointed in the Agricultural Department of the State as Fieldman. They belonged to Tamil Nadu Agricultural Subordinate Service. They were subsequently promoted to the posts of Deputy Agricultural Officer. These posts could be filled in by promoting Assistant Agricultural Officers. There is no higher avenue of promotion for the respondents beyond the promotional posts of Deputy Agricultural Officers.4. On the other hand Agricultural Officers are being directly recruited from open market and they belong to Tamil Nadu Agricultural Extention Service. The minimum educational qualification for being directly recruited as Agricultural Officer is Bachelor of Science (Agriculture) while so far as Deputy Agricultural Officers are concerned the minimum qualification for being considered for promotion to the said post is passing of SSLC examination equivalent to 10th standard examination. The respondents contended before the Tribunal that though they were discharging the same type of duties as Agricultural officers the pay scale available to them was Rs. 1660-60-2300-60-2600 while the pay scale of Agricultural Officers which was originally Rs. 1640-60-2600-75-2900 was further upward revised to Rs. 1820-60-2300-75-3200 and no such upward revisions and parity of revised pay scale were offered to the Deputy Agricultural Officers like the respondents. As noted earlier the said contention of the respondents appealed to the Tribunal and on applying the principle of Equal Pay for Equal Work the impugned order was passed in favour of the respondents.

Court's reasoning:
17. It becomes at once clear that in that case this Court was not concerned with a situation wherein there was dissimilarity of educational qualifications among the concerned groups of employees who were not offered the same pay scale. On the contrary in para 12 of the Report it has been clearly observed that the petitioners before this Court possessed the same qualifications, namely, B.A., B.Ed. as were possessed by the employees in the regular cadre and some of the petitioners before this Court were having even higher degrees like M.A., M.Ed. Under these circumstances when the State failed to establish different types of duties being discharged by these employees parity of pay scales was ordered to be granted to the petitioners. However the fact situation in the present case is entirely different. Hence no assistance can be rendered by the aforesaid decision to the contesting respondents. Our attention was then invited by learned counsel for the respondents to a decision of this Court in the case of Jaipal and others v. State of Haryana and others, JT 1988(2) SC 528 : 1988 Supp. 1 SCR 411. In this decision another Division Bench of this Court speaking through K.N. Singh, J. had to consider two identical schemes floated by the State of Haryana with the object of imparting literacy (functional and awareness) to adult illiterates and to provide literacy to children keeping away from schools. Even though the petitioners were discharging the same type of duties as instructors they were being paid a fixed salary of Rs. 200/- per month while under the second scheme, the employees discharging similar duties were offered a running pay scale of Rs. 420-700/-. On facts it was found that there was no difference in the nature of duties of the instructor and squad teachers. Both of them carried out similar work under the same employer and only on the ground that the instructors were part-time employees they could not be offered a fixed salary of Rs. 200/- per month. It becomes at once clear that there was no difference of educational qualifications amongst these twin sets of employees and the only ground on which difference of payment could be justified by the State was that they were employed under a different scheme and were working part-time only for four hours. On these peculiar facts of the case, therefore, it was held that instructors were entitled to same pay scale as sanctioned to squad teachers on the principle of Equal Pay or Equal Work. As the said decision also is rendered in the light of its peculiar facts it is not possible to agree with the learned counsel for the contesting respondents that the ratio of the said decision also gets squarely attracted to the facts of the present case. It is now time for us to take stock of thethe light of the well established facts on the record of these cases, to which we have made a reference earlier, it is impossible to hold that the Deputy Agricultural Officers like the contesting respondents are required to be given the same pay scale as Agriculturalview of these distinguishing features between the two groups of employees and especially in the light of the further fact that they form two separate cadres of gazetted and non-gazetted officers governed by different sets of service rules which in turn required maintenance of separate seniority lists, and on which aspect also there was no dispute between the parties, it is not possible to agree with the contention of learned counsel for the contesting respondents that only on the doctrine of Equal Pay for Equal Work the pay scale available to gazetted employees like Agricultural Officers must of necessity be made available to non-gazetted employees like Deputy Agricultural Officers on the pain of Articles 14 and 16 of the Constitution of India. In our view the Tribunal had patently erred in applying the said doctrine to the facts of the present cases. The decision of the Tribunal amounts to giving equal treatment to totally distinct and unequal categories of employees. The common judgment of the Tribunal, therefore, cannot be sustained.