LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) has dismissed a petition filed by a policeman seeking relief for departmental scale upgrade.
The LHC held that mere similarity in certain day-to-day functions or discharge of analogous duties of government employees not sufficient to establish legal equivalence for pay scale up-gradation.
The court passed the order in the petition of police personnel (moharrar) Muhammad Munir challenging the decision of respondent officials, disallowing upgrade the post of moharrar/ head moharrar from BS-07 to BS-14 as the posts of junior clerk had been upgraded from BS-05 to BS-07.
The court observed that an employee cannot acquire a vested right to have his post upgraded solely because another post, even one with comparable functions, has been upgraded through a policy decision.
The right to up-gradation must be traceable to an express policy decision, cadre restructuring duly notified by the competent authority, or a statutory entitlement, the court added.
The court further passed the remarks that functional resemblance cannot override the formal service structure, cadre classification, and policy framework determined by the competent authorities.
The court said it is a well-settled proposition of service jurisprudence that matters concerning the creation and abolition of posts, fixation and revision of pay scales, restructuring of service cadres, and upgradation of posts are matters of executive policy that lie primarily within the domain of the competent executive authorities. The court added that posts carrying different designations, even if their incumbents discharge analogous duties, were not automatically or constructively included within the ambit of such policy decisions.
The court said upgradation does not constitute a vested right enforceable in the absence of a formal policy decision, cadre restructuring, or approval by the competent authority and the precedents relied upon by the petitioner are factually distinguishable and cannot be mechanically applied to the present case.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026
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