specified the opportunities for career growth appear to have better results in terms of teacher retention and professional development.”<sup>42</sup> There is a role for the courts in this process. India, like many countries, now extensively employs and relies on contract teachers to obtain educational objectives. In this environment, the traditional understanding of labor rights for service employees – civil service tenure, homogenous pay scales, uniform benefits – no longer apply. That does not mean, however, that the principles underlying labor rights – the notion that workers deserve protections and that workplace unreliability undermines professional performance – no longer apply. It remains the task of the Indian judiciary to help articulate new ways to develop and protect the labor rights of contract teachers. In doing so, it will have to navigate the broader educational justifications for having these teachers (educational access, possibly superior short-term incentives, cost-effectiveness, etc) with the principles of fair employment. The Indian courts have abandoned one rights cluster equilibrium (where it was assumed permanent teachers with a well-defined and rigid labor status was best for both teachers and students), and now have to find a new rights cluster equilibrium to adapt to the government’s radically different education policy.

# **Results of Survey of Case Law**

# _Limitations in Methodology_

This study used the case law database of Manupatra– a leading Indian legal search engine – to search for relevant contract teacher cases in the Supreme Court, as well as those in the High Courts of Kerala, Gujarat, Bihar, and West Bengal. We performed three searches in the case law database of each of these courts, using the keyword “teacher*” combined with “ad hoc”, “contract”, and “regulari*” (with * searching all variations in the ending of a word, such as “regularization”, “regularization”, or “regularized”). We then compiled and classified the relevant cases found among these results.

This search not only drew cases concerning contract teachers and labor disputes from the primary or secondary school level, but also contract teachers, lecturers, and professors that taught at colleges or universities. It also found cases regarding contract teachers in informal education (for adults or children who drop out of school). Because of the similar approach the Court took towards these other types of contract teachers, these cases were also included amongst the results although categorized separately.

There are limitations to the study’s methodology. First, not all decisions of these courts are recorded. In 2008, the Supreme Court of India disposed of 67,459 matters, yet Manupatra only lists 1,790 judgments (about 2.7%). However, most of these disposals were admission matters (61,219). Since admission matters generally result in either a decision to reject the matter (which happens in over 80% of cases) or to accept it for regular hearing, then the appropriate ratio to track is reported judgments to disposed of regular hearing matters. In 2008, the Supreme Court disposed of 6,249 regular hearing

> 42 Y. Duthilleul: _Lessons learnt in the use of “contract” teachers: Synthesis rep_ ort (Paris, International Institute for Educational Planning, UNESCO, 2005), p. 59.

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