Citation: Vinit Kumar & Ors. v. State of U.P. Through Secretary & Ors., 2026 INSC 997 (Supreme Court of India, decided September 16, 2026)
Some job disputes drag on so long that the people who actually got hired have spent over a decade working the job before the case is even resolved. That’s exactly what happened here — a 2011 government recruitment fight in Uttar Pradesh has only now been laid to rest by the Supreme Court, 13 years after it began.
In 2011, Uttar Pradesh’s power corporation (UPPCL) advertised nearly 3,000 technician jobs. Thousands of candidates competed, and after a written exam and interviews, results were declared in 2012. A group of unsuccessful candidates challenged the selection — arguing some winning candidates had been wrongly allowed extra time to submit a required certificate, and that reservation quotas for one category had been exceeded. This dispute went up to the High Court, which ordered a revised result in 2013, removing candidates who’d submitted their certificates too late. A fresh list of appointments was issued — and yet the fight still wasn’t over. A new batch of candidates, unhappy with even this revised list, took their case all the way to the Supreme Court in a petition filed in 2013.
The case dragged on for years. In 2018, the Supreme Court asked the state to produce detailed records of exactly which candidates submitted their certificates and when. By 2019, the Court had narrowed the entire dispute down to one specific claim: the petitioners said they’d scored higher marks than some of the candidates who got the job, and the government’s response hadn’t properly addressed that point yet. The state was told to respond directly to this — and then, remarkably, the case simply sat for seven more years before being finally decided.
the Petition Was Dismissed
When the Court finally took up the case again, it found the petitioners’ central claim had quietly gone unanswered — by them. The government had specifically stated, in its response, that the petitioners simply hadn’t cleared the required cut-off marks for their category. Nobody on the petitioners’ side ever challenged or disputed this in their arguments. With that key claim essentially undefended, the case had nothing left standing.
Some of the petitioners had already filed and lost an identical case in the Allahabad High Court years earlier — and never mentioned this in their Supreme Court petition. Leaving out a fact like that is treated as a serious matter in itself; courts have held that suppressing a material fact like this can disqualify a petitioner from getting any relief at all, regardless of the merits.
On top of all this, the petitioners had also asked for a CBI investigation into the alleged irregularities. The Court firmly declined, reiterating a well-established principle: courts don’t order CBI investigations just because someone alleges wrongdoing — there needs to be a real evidentiary basis, and here, the petitioners hadn’t even filed a police complaint or laid out any concrete material to justify one.
By the time this case was finally resolved, the successful candidates from that 2011 recruitment drive had likely been working their jobs for well over a decade. In long-running service disputes, courts are often reluctant to unsettle appointments this far down the line — and a caution to litigants that hiding an inconvenient earlier loss in a different court rarely stays hidden for long.
