In Brief
A casual employee of Doordarshan, engaged for over a decade from 1985 until regularization in 1995, sought to have her casual service years counted towards her pension benefits. The High Court had allowed her petition, treating casual service as "temporary service" under the pension rules. The Supreme Court reversed this, holding that casual and contractual services are fundamentally different from temporary service under the Central Civil Services (Pension) Rules, 1972. The Court found that neither the pension rules nor the department's regularization scheme provided for counting casual service towards pension benefits, and that the existence of such schemes in other departments could not create entitlement in the absence of a scheme in the respondent's own department.
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