- (1.) Heard Sri S. K. Kalia, Senior Advocate assisted by S/Sri Sameer Kalia, M.D. Singh Sekhar, Senior Advocate, C. B. Pandey, Dr. L.P. Misra, I.P. Singh, Deepak Srivatava, Vikas Budhwar, Rohit Tripathi, Arun Kumar Shukla, Rajeev Singh, S.K. Yadav Warsi, S.P. Singh, K. S. Pawar, Harshvardhan Singh, Ms. Madhumita Bose for the petitioners and S/Sri Prashant Chandra, Sri Kapil Deo, Senior Advocates, J.N. Mathur, Additional Advocate General assisted by Sri H.P. Srivastava, Additional Chief Standing Counsel, Siddarth Dhaon, Rajnish Kumar, Anupam Mehrotra etc. for the opposite parties.
(2.) The aforesaid bunch of writ petitions relates to promotion from the post of Junior Engineer to the post of Assistant Engineer in the Public Works Department. Promotion to the post of Assistant Engineer has long checkered history. In the past, the matter went upto Hon'ble Apex Court on a number of occasions and inspite of decisions rendered in the cases of Diploma Engineers' Sangh, P.D. Agrawal and Anjani Kumar Misra, the matter could not be settled and now again the controversy relating to promotion has arisen.
(3.) In all these writ petitions, the dispute revolves amongst the Junior Engineers Degree Holders with Diploma holders (who subsequently obtained the degree) with regard to promotion on the vacancies pertaining to the year 1997-98 till selection year 2003-04.;