On 10 April 2006, a five-judge Constitution Bench led by Sabharwal CJ and authored by Balasubramanyan J held that public employment must follow Article 16 — competitive, advertised, merit-based recruitment to sanctioned posts — and that temporary, casual, daily-wage, ad hoc or contractual appointees made outside that scheme acquire no fundamental right to regularisation however long they may have served. The judgment drew a sharp doctrinal line between 'irregular' and 'illegal' appointments, granted a one-time, fixed-date paragraph-53 exception for irregular appointees who had completed ten years of service on sanctioned posts as of 10 April 2006, and overruled *Dharwad PWD*, *Daily Rated Casual Labour v. Union of India* and *Ashwani Kumar v. State of Bihar*. The decision remains the gravitational centre of Indian regularisation jurisprudence two decades on.