Chiangmong Khiamniungan, PhD
In a highly consequential recent judgment (reported in The Morung Express, 28 September 2026), a two-judge division bench of the Gauhati High Court, Kohima Bench has prohibited the continuation of the perfunctory yearly extensions of contractually appointed Assistant Professors in the fifteen government colleges under the Department of Higher Education, Government of Nagaland (DHE).An overwhelming majority of them, it must be remembered, were appointed without open advertisement and many of them were appointed even though they did not possess the minimum prescribed qualifications. The judgment has also directed the State of Nagaland to either take effective steps to create adequate posts and fill them through the Nagaland Public Service Commission or, if this is not possible, resort to contractual employment only in full conformity with the relevant University Grants Commission (UGC) regulation. This regulation stipulates, among others, that the same qualifications and selection procedure for the contractually appointed Assistant Professors shall be the same as that for regularly appointed ones.
This judgment is only the latest development in an otherwise long standing legal battle over the nature of public employment in Nagaland, a battle that goes back to at least 2015 when ACAUT (Against Corruption and Unabated Taxation) challenged, through a public interest litigation, the rampant practice of contractual/ad-hoc appointments made without open advertisements and their subsequent regularisation. From 2019 onwards, the legal challenge to such practices within DHE was taken up by the Nagaland Net Qualified Forum (NNQF) which has been filing numerous writ petitions. Significantly, this latest judgment ‘quashes’ or nullifies two previous judgments passed by a single judge bench in 2025 which had dismissed the various writ petitions filed by the NNQF on technical grounds.
Constitutionality, not technicality
In all the various adverse judgments, including those nullified by the latest judgment, that have previously been rendered on the numerous petitions filed against such appointments, the persistent and decisive argument has invoked the notions of locus standi and maintainability. The State and the private respondents, i.e. the contractually appointed Assistant Professors, have invariably argued, and the Court has tended to agree, that the petitioners do not possess the locus standi to challenge the appointments and that the petitions themselves are not maintainable.
To explain by way of an example, in response to the multiple writ petitions filed by the NNQF in 2019, the State and almost all the private respondents contended that NNQF was not a registered organisation. As such, it was not a ‘person’ in the eyes of law. Therefore, a petition brought by such an organisation is not ‘maintainable’.
On the matter of locus standi, in many cases, the respondents teaching a given subject argued that none of the petitioners possessed NET qualification in the same subject. In those cases where the petitioners did possess the relevant NET qualification, it was often argued that they did not possess the qualification on the date when the respondents had been appointed. In either case, the petitioners could not have applied/been considered for the post anyway since would have been ineligible for appointment. As such, no rights of petitioners had been infringed by the contractual appointments: they had not been aggrieved. They therefore possessed no legal standing on the basis of which to challenge the appointment of said respondents.
Such arguments were taken seriously by the 2025 judgments which took the view that, to quote, ‘the writ petition is not maintainable in the present form and there is no scope to enter into the merits of the case. The writ petition is therefore dismissed on the ground of maintainability and locus standi’.
The requirement of maintainability and locus standi are important: they exist to prevent, among others, frivolous litigation. However, the latest judgment refuses to take a narrowly technical–procedural view. It adopts a broader substantive–constitutional perspective. Indeed, it despairs over the repeated failure of the Court to take its constitutional role as a safeguard, among others, of justice and equality seriously. ‘We are sorry to say,’ it notes, ‘that every time these infractions are brought to the notice of this Court, such causes of actions are thwarted on the question of maintainability without going into the constitutional principles under Article 14 and Article 16 of the Constitution’.
Instead, it reasons that what was challenged was the very nature of the appointments which, by being made through the backdoor, blatantly violated the right to equality (Article 14) and right to equality of opportunity (Article 16). These rights are part and parcel of the basic inviolable features of the constitution. Given the great public and constitutional importance of these principles and, by extension, the importance of the petitions which brought their infringements to the notice of the Court, the judgment concludes that ‘the learned Single Judge with humility in our command ought not to have non-suited the Appellants [or, petitioners] on technicalities’.
Complete, not partial, reading
The judgment also demolishes the argument of the State that the contractual appointments are permitted by the UGC regulations. It is true that the UGC regulations which govern the minimum standards of higher education in India allow for the contractual appointment of teachers ‘only when it is absolutely necessary and when the student–teacher ratio does not satisfy the laid-down norms’.
However, the same regulation (Regulation 13 of 2018) also stipulates that the number of contract teachers should not exceed 10 percent of total faculty positions, that the required qualifications and selection procedure for them shall be the same as that of regular appointments, that their remuneration shall not be less than that of the regular appointees, and that contract appointments shall be valid for one academic session (i.e., semester) only.
None of these other stipulations have been fulfilled: the number of contract teachers currently stands at 23 percent; their appointments did not even follow the basic requirements of open advertisement envisaged under Articles 14 and 16, let alone the complex norms prescribed by the UGC for the appointment of regular teachers; the contract teachers are paid less than a third of the gross salary of a regular teacher; and their services are extended for a year, not a semester. The judgment sarcastically observes that ‘it seems that the State of Nagaland had only taken cognizance of the first sentence’ and that ‘in order to fulfill one component of student-teacher ratio’, it ‘violated the other four conditions’.
The right frame
In an earlier piece (‘Regularisation of Contract Teachers: An Explainer’, Morung Express, 30 April 2025), I had flagged the main issue in contention as that of the right to equality of opportunity, which is a facet of the broader right to equality. In recognising and asserting, as seen above, the role of the Court in safeguarding such fundamental constitutional principles and in overturning the narrowly technical focus and the unfortunate lack of constitutional imagination of prior judgments, this judgment sets an important precedent and establishes a constitutional framework within which to adjudicate the irregularities and illegalities in matters of public employment in Nagaland. Such irregularities and illegalities, as we all know, are as pervasive as they are blatant. The consequences, and this is obvious, should hardly remain limited to the appointment of contractual Assistant Professors in the Department of Higher Education. At the end of the day, the larger question is that of the nature of public employment in Nagaland which already suffers from a deficit of public trust, accountability and transparency. However, even as we welcome and appreciate this judgment, and even as we applaud the NNQF for its passion and stamina in seeing the petitions through, the responsibility now shifts to the state which must proactively and positively discharge its own constitutional role.
The author teaches political philosophy at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru and can be reached at [email protected].
