The wage Haryana can afford and the wage its sanitation workers are owed

The state as employer and the convenient shield of "legal hurdles" Imagine you are the official who must decide whether to regularise 13,093 sanitation workers currently earning ₹20,590 a month. Full regularisation would push their pay past ₹34,000 and add pension and post-retirement benefits your municipal budget was never built to carry, multiplied across every other outsourced worker who would then demand the same.

Deny it and you keep essential services running on wages that barely clear subsistence, while claiming you had no real choice. The dilemma is not manufactured This is a genuine tension, not a dressed-up compliance question.

On one side sits the state's constitutional character as a "model employer" - the idea that a government cannot demand the same labour discipline it expects from private industry while paying its most essential, most exposed workers below what dignity requires.

On the other sits a real legal constraint: the Supreme Court's Umadevi (2006) ruling explicitly bars mass regularisation as a backdoor into public employment, precisely to stop governments from converting temporary hiring into permanent liability without due process.

Minister Krishan Bedi's invocation of "legal hurdles" is not obviously false. Where the convenience creeps in But notice what the state chose instead of testing that legal constraint honestly: a Contractual Employees Act offering job security until 58, without the wage parity or pension access regularisation would bring.

That is the state solving its own fiscal exposure first and calling it a legal solution. If Bhupinder Singh Hooda's claim about 2014 policies surviving judicial review is accurate, it suggests Umadevi leaves more room than the government's current posture admits - and "no such policy existed anywhere in the country" is doing more rhetorical work than legal work.

What this actually costs Every month this standoff continues, someone pays. The 13,093 workers pay in wages that fall short of what the state's own revised offer implicitly admits they deserve. Residents pay in accumulated waste and public health risk.

And the 62 workers already dismissed pay with their livelihoods for insisting the state honour an obligation it has not clearly proven it cannot afford. The resolution this dilemma demands The honest position is this: fiscal prudence is a legitimate constraint, but it stops being an ethical shield the moment a state can afford one pay revision (to ₹25,560) but claims it cannot examine a legally tested path to full regularisation.

A model employer does not need to concede every demand - it needs to prove, transparently, which constraints are real and which are convenient. Haryana has shown it can move on wages. It has not yet shown it has genuinely tested whether it can move on regularisation and until it does, "legal hurdles" reads less like a constraint and more like a shield.