MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court has directed the chief secretary of Tamil Nadu to file a report containing a detailed list of number of contract workers employed across all government departments in the state, along with their duration of service, among others.
A bench of justices P Velmurugan and KK Ramakrishnan gave the direction on Tuesday, while hearing an appeal filed by the government challenging an order passed by a single judge in November last year, directing it to reconsider the rejection of a contract worker’s request to regularise his service.
E Dhanuskodi was working as a driver in the market committee in Tirunelveli. He had filed a petition challenging the rejection of his request for regularisation in 2021.
The government counsel had contended before the single judge that the petitioner was ineligible for regularisation as he had taken a break from service and had not completed 10 years of service at the time of filing the petition.
The single judge, however, had ordered the government to reconsider in view of the fact that the petitioner was still working on consolidated pay and the Supreme Court had deprecated the practice of extracting work from employees for a long number of years without regularising their service.
Aggrieved by this, the government filed the present appeal. Hearing the appeal, the judges questioned as to why many contract employees are made to work for more than 10 years without regularisation, causing them to lose their chance at entering the workforce through direct recruitment. They suo motu impleaded the chief secretary in the case and issued the above direction.