Incontrovertibly, the petitioner, at no point of time, has been under put off duty, nor has he faced any serious disciplinary action on account of absenteeism. What remains to be seen is whether the petitioner was not working by the date of the regularisation proceedings. In my considered view, the expression working in the above extract has not been employed in the temporal sense, but as a condition of employment, or in other words, as the status of the workman during the relevant period expression. If the ‘working’ is given a literal interpretation, if any of the workman whose services were regularised through the proceedings in question was to be physically absent on that particular day, he would not have the benefit of the proceedings. Once a person ceases to be an employee or has been under suspension, put off being the expression used in the place of suspension for contract employees, or facing disciplinary proceedings, he could not have the benefit of regularisation. In that sense, the expressions ‘not working, on a put off duty and facing disciplinary action for absenteeism’ are governed by the well entrenched interpretive principle of ejusdem generis.
