Why Meghalaya Will Regularise Some Ad Hoc Staff but Not Others: CM Explains the Rules
Shillong: Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma has set out, in unusually plain terms, the legal line the state government says it cannot cross on ad hoc employees. Speaking in the Assembly during the autumn session, he told the House that regularisation is possible only for staff appointed on or before 31 December 2007 against sanctioned government posts. Those appointed after that date, even if they have worked for years in the same chairs, cannot be absorbed in the same way without inviting a court challenge.
The clarification was not a new policy announcement so much as an explanation of a policy already in motion for more than three years. It came as opposition parties, employee groups and student organisations continued to press the government to treat long-serving post-2007 staff the same way as their older colleagues. Sangma’s answer was that sympathy is not the same as legality.
The Supreme Court choice the state accepted
The framework the Chief Minister cited is the Supreme Court’s 2006 Constitution Bench judgment in Secretary, State of Karnataka v. Uma Devi. That ruling generally bars courts and governments from converting temporary, daily-wage or ad hoc appointments into permanent jobs. Public posts, the Court said, must be filled through a fair, advertised process consistent with Articles 14 and 16 of the Constitution.
Paragraph 53 of the same judgment created a narrow exception. As a one-time measure, governments could regularise irregular—not illegal—appointments of qualified people who had worked for ten years or more on duly sanctioned vacant posts, without the cover of court orders. The exercise was meant to be finite. After that, states were expected to stop the cycle of back-door hiring and fill vacancies through regular recruitment.
Meghalaya applied that window with a cut-off of 31 December 2007. Sangma told the House that the Court had, in effect, given the state two options: remove the pre-cut-off ad hoc staff and recruit afresh, or regularise them through a structured process. Many of those employees had already spent decades in the same posts. Some appointments dated back to the mid- and late-1990s. The Cabinet chose regularisation rather than mass displacement.
Four batches, incomplete files, thousands of names
The process did not happen in one notification. Departments did not have complete records. Names arrived in waves. Sangma said the first batch contained about 2,000 names. A second batch added more than 1,000. A third brought another 1,000. A fourth added around 45. Over three years, departments kept returning with small lists of people who had been missed—“five here, twenty there.”
Earlier Cabinet decisions give a similar picture. In 2022 the government began regularising 3,635 pre-2007 ad hoc appointees. Subsequent rounds absorbed those left out of the first list, including about 850 in a later notification, 98 in May 2026 (55 of them from the Health Department), and 38 more in June 2026. In October 2025 the Cabinet also regularised nearly 1,000 Staff Nurses and Auxiliary Nurse Midwives appointed on an ad hoc basis against sanctioned posts before December 2007, applying the same principles used in 2022.
Officials have repeatedly said these decisions do not add a new salary burden. The staff were already drawing government scales on sanctioned posts. Regularisation changed their legal status, not the fact that the posts and the pay already existed.
The June 2026 batch of 38 was a test of how far the government would go when paperwork was missing. Original sanction letters could not be traced. The Cabinet still approved regularisation after the appointments were verified through treasury records, salary history and departmental certification. Sangma described that group as the latest beneficiaries of an effort to close decades-old cases in a lawful way.
Why the line stops at 2007
The political pressure is on the other side of the cut-off. Personnel Department figures compiled in 2025 put about 1,514 ad hoc employees appointed after 31 December 2007 on sanctioned posts. Many have now served close to two decades. Activist petitions and the Voice of the People Party have argued that terminating them and forcing them to sit open exams is unfair, because the irregular appointment was the government’s doing, not theirs.
Sangma’s Assembly reply was blunt. Regularising a post-2007 appointment that skipped the prescribed process would be treated as an illegal appointment, not merely an irregular one. If anyone challenged it, the Court would ask how the government regularised a recruitment that never followed the rules after the Supreme Court had already closed the one-time window. “It is not a simple matter where somebody says why aren’t we regularising an ad hoc employee,” he said. The government feels for the staff, he added, but it has to work inside the regulations.
That is why the Cabinet’s August 2025 decision on post-2007 staff was not absorption. It was an SOP for fresh recruitment through competent agencies, coupled with a one-time Certificate of Age Condonation valid for one year so that incumbents over the usual upper age limit can still sit the exam. Appointees after the cut-off, the Office Memorandum states, are not eligible for regularisation.
Closing the tap that created the problem
The same week the Cabinet regularised the 38 pre-2007 staff in June 2026, it deleted Regulation 3(f) of the Meghalaya Public Service Commission (Limitation of Functions) Regulations, 1972. That clause had allowed temporary appointments outside the Commission’s normal role. Meant for exceptional situations, it became a standing route for prolonged ad hoc hiring.
Sangma called the deletion a governance reform. Recruitment boards are now in place, processes have been streamlined, and vacancy forecasting is being automated. Short-term gaps, he said, should be met by contracts until regular recruitment is finished—not by another generation of ad hoc appointments that later demand permanence.
A related decision in April 2026 dealt with staff already regularised. Many had been promoted after 2022. Pension files stalled because the Accountant General needed to know whether benefits should follow the original regularised post or the promoted rank. The Cabinet granted a one-time condonation for promotions processed under the rules, so salary and pension could be calculated on the higher post.
The wider recruitment squeeze
The ad hoc dispute sits inside a larger jobs argument. On 25 August, Sangma told the Assembly that 20,655 educated unemployed youth were registered with Employment Exchanges. Over three years the state had advertised 9,042 government posts and made 6,915 appointments. Seventy-four recruitment examinations had been delayed, cancelled or challenged. Police, medical services, the MPSC and District Selection Committees accounted for a large share of the appointments that did go through.
That is the tension the Chief Minister was trying to manage: long-serving ad hoc staff who kept offices running, and a younger cohort that sees every regularised irregular appointment as a seat taken without an exam. The government’s stated position is that the Supreme Court allowed one historic clean-up for pre-2008 cases, and that repeating it after the cut-off would collapse the distinction the Court drew between irregular and illegal appointments.
Whether that explanation satisfies employees appointed in 2008 and after is another matter. The legal rule the Chief Minister laid down is now clear. Regularisation in Meghalaya is not a reward for years of service alone. It is a one-time exception, tied to a date, a sanctioned post, and a judgment the state says it cannot expand without being pulled back into court.
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