A March 27 judgment by the Punjab and Haryana High Court, holding that the right to be considered for a promotion is a fundamental right, brings into focus a nuanced legal principle governing public employment in India.

It highlights that while no government employee can demand a promotion as an absolute guarantee, the Constitution ensures that they must be fairly evaluated for one if they meet the eligibility criteria. The recent case before the Punjab and Haryana High Court illustrates how this right is often breached in practice.

What was the case in question?

The petitioner, a junior engineer named Kulwant Singh, approached the court after he was left out of a Departmental Promotion Committee (DPC) meeting. A DPC is an internal government panel that evaluates eligible employees for upcoming vacancies.

The state government argued before the court that Singh was ineligible because his civil engineering diploma was obtained through distance learning.

However, the High Court found that the government had misinterpreted its own amended service rules, which explicitly exempted existing employees like Singh from the educational requirement. Because of this administrative error, Singh’s case had never been presented to the panel.

The court ruled that this failure unjustly denied him his fundamental right to be considered for promotion. It ordered the government to grant him a notional promotion with retroactive effect and directed that DPCs must be held regularly, that is, every three months.

The High Court’s intervention was based on a right built over decades by the Supreme Court, rooted in Articles 14 and 16(1) of the Constitution that guarantee equality before the law and equal opportunity in matters of public employment, respectively. Over the years, courts have interpreted “employment” broadly to encompass the entire arc of a person’s career, meaning equal opportunity extends to career progression.

The Supreme Court distinguished between the right to be considered and the right to an actual promotion in 1991. In a case involving the Orissa-based Lift Irrigation Corporation, the apex court ruled that “there is no fundamental right to promotion, but an employee has only right to be considered for promotion, when it arises, in accordance with relevant rules.”

This principle was underlined in 1999 by a five-judge Constitution Bench in the Ajit Singh vs State of Punjab case. “Article 16(1) provides to every employee otherwise eligible for promotion or who comes within the zone of consideration, a fundamental right to be ‘considered’ for promotion,” the court held.

“If a person satisfies the eligibility and zone criteria but is not considered for promotion, then there will be a clear infraction of his fundamental right to be ‘considered’ for promotion, which is his personal right,” it said.

How has its application played out?

In July 2024, the Supreme Court reaffirmed this principle in Bihar State Electricity Board versus Dharamdeo Das. In this case, a bureaucrat demanded that his promotion be backdated to 1997, the exact year a vacancy arose, rather than 2003, when he was actually promoted.

The court dismissed his claim, observing that “no doubt, a right to be considered for promotion has been treated by courts not just as a statutory right but as a fundamental right, at the same time, there is no fundamental right to promotion itself.” It clarified that an employee cannot claim a “vested right” to be promoted from the exact date a seat becomes empty, especially if administrative exigencies delayed the process.

High Courts have increasingly relied on this right to provide relief to government employees aggrieved by administrative delays that may stall DPC meetings for years, leaving them without the opportunity for a promotion and stagnating in the same rank.

In December 2025, the Himachal Pradesh High Court heard the plea of several senior school lecturers – all aged over 57 – who were waiting for a DPC to evaluate them for the post of principal before they retired. The court directed the state to fast-track the process, noting that the fundamental right to be considered for a promotion “cannot be defeated by inordinate and unnecessary delays”.

Similarly, in 2022, the Manipur High Court granted relief to senior police inspectors who became eligible for promotion in 2007 but were only evaluated and promoted in 2021. Noting that the state’s lapses had cost the officers years of career progression, the court granted them notional promotions from the date the original vacancies arose.

The Delhi High Court, in a 2024 judgement, also echoed this sentiment, stressing that “it is imperative that DPCs are convened at regular intervals so that the employees, who are in the zone of consideration and eligible, do not stagnate for want of consideration for promotion and at the same time, the functioning of the Government is not adversely impacted.”