New Delhi: The Delhi High Court has directed Delhi University (DU) to regularise two ad-hoc assistant professors, Namita Khare and Mehak Talwar, in a significant ruling that condemns the varsity’s prolonged use of temporary appointments as a substitute for regular recruitment.
Serving in DU’s Department of Germanic and Romance Studies since 2017, the petitioners challenged a 2022 university notification revising guidelines for recruitment and shortlisting of assistant professors.
They contended that the guidelines were arbitrarily applied to exclude long-serving ad-hoc faculty like themselves, despite meeting all eligibility norms under UGC regulations.
A division bench of Justices C Hari Shankar and Ajay Digpaul ruled in their favour, observing that DU had failed to hold regular recruitment while continuously extending the petitioners’ tenure with artificial breaks.
“The petitioners were not engaged for a finite project or stop-gap arrangement, but entrusted with core instructional and administrative responsibilities within a permanent academic framework,” the court said.
The bench noted that Khare and Talwar had contributed uninterruptedly for over a decade and were treated as “indispensable” to the functioning of
the department.
Their exclusion from regularisation despite sustained service was termed “violative of Articles 14 and 16,” which guarantee equality and equal opportunity in public employment.
Criticising DU’s employment practices, the court remarked, “The university was consciously using ad-hoc appointments as a substitute for regular employment, thereby circumventing its obligation to provide fair service conditions.”
It further added that once it is established that the professors were appointed via open competition against sanctioned posts and continued performing regular duties, their temporary designation could not be used to deny them equitable treatment.
The ruling underscores the importance of fair employment practices and offers a significant precedent for thousands of ad-hoc teachers across Indian universities.