Court Says No Proof of Pre‑March‑2015 Employment, Dismisses PDD Workers’ Plea

In a decisive ruling, the Jammu & Kashmir and Ladakh High Court’s division bench refused to extend the benefits of SRO‑520 (2017) to daily‑wage employees of the Power Development Department.

The petition, filed by 179 workers, alleged that they were excluded from a departmental list of 472 candidates slated for regularisation. Their claim rested on the assertion that they had been engaged as daily‑rate labourers between 2012 and 2015, prior to the 17 March 2015 ban on new daily‑wage hirings.

The court found that the department’s records showed the names were initially part of earlier drafts but were deliberately omitted from the final SRO‑520 list. However, the petitioners failed to produce any verifiable document proving their employment before the cut‑off date. The bench, led by Acting Chief Justice Sanjeev Kumar and Justice Mohammad Yusuf Wani, stated that without such evidence, the workers could not invoke seniority or provisional inclusion as a right to regularisation.

The judgment further clarified that while departmental records are often retained in the department’s custody, the onus remains on the employees to present credible proof. As no admissible evidence was offered, the court upheld the lower court’s decision and dismissed the intra‑court appeals.