While hearing the case from the Karnataka High Court involving a staff nurse —who joined in 1979 and requested for her cadre to be changed to First Division Assistant (FDA) in 1985, owing to her medical conditions—a bench comprising Justices PS Narasimha and Manoj Misra ruled that when government employees seeks a transfer, the same cannot be called a transfer in public interest. Also, on being transferred to the post, such employees do not carry the same status or seniority level with them. Their seniority is reset.
The staff nurse in this case had put in a request for transfer and had consented to be being placed at the lowest level of the new cadre. The Medical Board had also found her to be medically unfit as she had claimed.
Therefore, the Karnataka government had granted her request for transfer in 1989, and this led to her seniority being fixed from 1989 instead of 1979.
However, the said nurse challenged this in 2007, claiming that her seniority should have been fixed as per her original year of appointment. The Karnataka Administrative Tribunal (KAT) and High Court ruled in her favour treating her medical-based transfer as a transfer in public interest.
Not accepting the High Court’s decision, the State decided to appeal to the Supreme Court, where the bench observed that since the nurse had asked for a transfer of her own will and had, in writing, agreed to being placed at the bottom of the new cadre, she could no right to seniority based on the original year of appointment. This would be unjust to the other existing employees in the cadre.
When the nurse’s transfer request was entertained, she was accommodated in the new post after making adjustments to the claims and status of the employees already existing there. Therefore, it cannot be called a transfer in public interest. The SC stated that by ruling in the nurse’s favour, the High Court and the Tribunal had made a mistake.
