Supreme Court: A 20-Year Career Undone by a 2005 Transfer

Case: Hemant Kumar & Ors. v. State of Haryana (with connected appeals)
Court: Supreme Court of India | Judges: Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Manoj Misra
Decided: August 18, 2026 | Citation: 2026 INSC 878

Four government engineers were sent on deputation from one department to another back around 2005, and were later “absorbed” (made permanent) there — building their entire careers, seniority, and promotions in that new department for roughly two decades. The High Court had let this arrangement stand, only trimming their seniority a bit. But the Supreme Court went much further — it declared the entire deputation and absorption of all four officers illegal and void, and ordered them repatriated back to their original department, nearly 20 years later, with their seniority reset there instead

The four men originally worked in Haryana’s Development and Panchayat Department. Around 2005, they were sent on deputation to the state’s Public Works Department (Buildings and Roads) — meant, in theory, as a temporary arrangement. Over the following years, that temporary posting turned permanent: the four were formally absorbed into their new department, moved up its seniority ladder, and secured promotions, treating it as their professional home for the better part of two decades.
Other engineers in that department, however, weren’t willing to let this pass quietly. These were officers who had joined through direct recruitment — the standard, open process — and they felt sidelined by colleagues who had entered through deputation and then somehow ended up senior to them. What began as a few objections eventually snowballed into a decade-plus of litigation, with multiple writ petitions and appeals piling up in the Punjab and Haryana High Court.

By the time the case reached the High Court in 2023, so much time had passed that the Court was reluctant to uproot the four engineers entirely. It allowed them to continue in their new department, reasoning that undoing two decades of settled service would be too disruptive. Its intervention was limited to trimming their seniority — ruling that they couldn’t be placed above the direct recruits who had joined around the same period.

The Supreme Court took a harder look at the foundation of the whole arrangement, rather than just adjusting its consequences. It examined whether the original deputation had even followed the applicable service rules — and found that it hadn’t. For two of the four officers, the deputation was held to be outright illegal; for the other two, irregular. Once that foundational step was found defective, the Court reasoned that nothing built on top of it — including their later “absorption” into permanent posts — could be treated as valid, no matter how long it had gone unchallenged. Time, the Court effectively said, does not cure an illegality; it only delays the reckoning.

As a result, all four engineers have now been ordered repatriated to the department they left roughly 20 years ago — with their seniority to be recalculated there, placing them just ahead of the colleagues who were junior to them at the time they were transferred out. In effect, the last two decades of their careers in the Public Works Department have been legally wiped away, as though they had never left their original department at all.