Seniority Lists in CBEC – A Perennial Row – IRS is IFS - The lifeline of law is not logic or reason but life's experience and commonsense.
YOU talk to any Customs and Central Excise officer and there is a tale of woe of injustice, being left out, stagnation, lack of promotion and seniority disputes pending at some court or other. It may as well be called the IFS – the Indian Frustrated Service.
Let us start at the bottom of the greasy IRS pole. You have the Assistant Commissioner – 50 percent of Assistant Commissioner posts are filled by direct recruitment and 50 percent by promotion and this promotion channel includes various cadres like Superintendents of Central Excise, Superintendents of Customs and Appraisers of Customs – even among them, some are promotees and some direct recruits. And seniority is a big issue and there is a case pending in every possible forum. The cases have gone right up to the Supreme Court and keep bouncing back in Tribunals and High Courts. Right from Tax Assistants to Chief Commissioners, everybody has a seniority problem.
In this situation, the Board finds it almost impossible to promote officers as there is some litigation in some court. Board, with judicial approval, started ad hoc promotions, but how long can you continue with adhocism? Today Assistant Commissioners are promoted on adhoc basis and those promoted on adhoc basis are further promoted on adhoc basis. So from AC to CC, they are all ad hoc .
Recently the Delhi High Court had to decide yet another interesting case on this seniority issue.
On an application filed by Mr. PR Chandrasekharan , a Commissioner, CAT, Delhi, in an order in 2007 had directed the Government to re-convene the DPC particularly for the next higher posts for which earlier DPCs had been held after 22.11.1996.
Well, this was an impossible situation for the Government and so they approached the Delhi High Court, against the CAT order.
The Delhi High Court made some very interesting observations:
(i) Providence had ordained that litigation would continue and indeed it has. The Union of India took excessive time to re-workout the promotions in the 50% promotee quota in Group A Service.
(ii) Now, the principle of selection on merit is not a jurisprudential concept, but flows out of the office memorandums issued by the Government from time to time. In other words, what should be the principle to determine merit is a matter of policy and the Government/Executive is free to lay down a criteria subject of course to the same being reasonable.
(iii) The lifeline of law is not logic or reason but life's experience and commonsense. Rules of law are meant to sub-serve the cause of justice and it is not unknown to judges to be encountering situations where logic and reason have to be abandoned and a practical approach adopted to resolve an issue.
(iv) Problems encountered by Judges as are also encountered by the Executive and faced with a situation where the logic or the reason of a rule of law leads to a breakdown situation, the executive decision to ignore the applicable rule and craft a decision which does justice has been accepted by the Courts.
(v) The regular promotions can only be made after finalization of the seniority list for the reason only when the persons in the zone of consideration are ascertained with clarity, can the further process of evaluating them on a given criteria be completed.
(vi) Under no circumstances can it be that directly recruited officers would earn promotion in the same panel year on a different criteria for merit and the promotee officers would earn promotion in the same panel year on a different criteria.
(vii) Thus, not on the letter of the law or the logic, but guided by the situation and requiring a situationalist approach to be adopted, we are of the opinion that the promotion order dated 3.5.2002 has to be upheld and maintained.
The High Court had some good words for the Counsel of PR Chandrasekharan - we find good logic advanced by Shri C.Harishankar , learned counsel who very ably espoused the cause of Shri P.R.Chandrasekharan and Shri C.P.Srivastava , with Shri Sunil Uke getting free benefit of good counsel!
Finally all this good counsel did not impress the Court and the Government won the battle – maybe temporarily.
And incidentally today, Mr. PR Chandrasekharan is not with the Department – we are told that he got relieved yesterday to join the CESTAT as Member (T).
We welcome Mr. PRC , as Hon'ble Member of the CESTAT – let the Department continue to deal with its seniority problems – Mr. PRC (as he is fondly called) will have more weighty issues to decide now as Member of CESTAT.
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