Supreme Court: Coming Back to Work After Retirement Doesn’t Come With the Same Pay Deal

Case: R.K. Yadav & Anr. v. Union of India and Others
Court: Supreme Court of India | Judges: Justices S.V.N. Bhatti and N.V. Anjaria
Decided: August 12, 2026 | Citation: 2026 INSC 848

Two retired judicial officers went back to work after retirement — and then asked for the same kind of pay raise given to judges in other government tribunals. The Supreme Court said no, and explained why re-employment changes the rules of the game.

After retiring, the two petitioners were re-employed as Presiding Officers of Central Government Industrial Tribunals — bodies that settle labour and industrial disputes. Their pay was fixed in line with a District Judge’s salary, based on a government pay committee’s recommendation. But they noticed that judges in some other tribunals — like the Central Administrative Tribunal — had been given a bigger raise under the 6th Pay Commission. So they went to the Supreme Court, arguing this unequal treatment violated their right to equality under the Constitution.

Why the Court Said No
The Court pointed to one simple fact: these petitioners weren’t ordinary employees — they were re-employed pensioners, brought back to work after retiring. Under a specific government rule, people in this category only get the pay scale attached to the post they’re re-employed into — they don’t get to demand a “better” scale by comparing themselves to different tribunals or different employees.

The Court also made a broader point: fixing pay scales is the government’s job, not the courts’. Judges generally stay out of these disputes unless there’s clear bad faith or an unexplained, glaring unfairness — and here, the pay scale had been set by a proper expert committee, not on a whim. The Constitution’s equality guarantee doesn’t mean everyone gets treated identically — it just means people in truly similar situations should be treated alike. Since re-employed pensioners are a genuinely different category from regular officers, giving them a different pay structure wasn’t discrimination — it was a valid distinction.