Daughter should get preference over son in compassionate appointments: HC

A Punjab and Haryana high court bench has said that women should be given preference over men in compassionate appointments, when both are born of public servants dying in harness.

The high court bench of justice Rajiv Narain Raina, while dismissing the plea of a Hoshiarpur youth, said able-bodied men should be left to fend for themselves in the country today in the war of attrition fought daily in the employment market and in court. “This special provision is meant to secure chastity of the weaker sex and that they are not driven to red-light areas, to put it bluntly,” justice Raina said.

The petitioner had argued that he was denied the job on the wrong premise as the facts recorded in his case were wrong. He had three sisters while it was recorded while denying the job that he had two elder brothers and a sister.

“It makes little difference as to the numerical strength of members of the family while dealing with a case of compassionate appointment. when we talk of rights of children and wives of dying servants of the government, we conveniently forget about the rights of street children who unfortunately were not born to government servants and grew up in the cradle of want. Penury is a relative thing,” the high court bench recorded, further stating that the provision is meant for giving minimal relief to the family facing extreme financial stress and could not be understood as a perennial or an evergreen source of recruitment from amongst the rank and file of progeny of government servants dying in harness.

The high court bench took note of the submissions by the respondent state, which had argued that the family waited for the petitioner to be mature, which indicated that the requirement of the family were being met easily. “It is nobody’s fundamental right to be provided a government job without competition in a country where there are no jobs to be had for the asking and a large population is visited by hunger, want and deprivation of the bare necessitates of the teeming multitude,” the high court said, while dismissing the petition and further stating that there was no special feature in the case for the court “to walk an extra mile” for the petitioner.

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