THE RATIO. One judgment, decoded twice: once for anyone, once for the profession.

Headnote

An employee resigned from one university, asked for his own notice period to be shortened, accepted every benefit that came with leaving, used his experience certificate to land a new job elsewhere, and then, four months later, asked for his old job back on a technicality: the person who signed off on his resignation was not, strictly, the right authority to do so. The Supreme Court has held that even setting the technicality aside, an employee who has already taken everything a resignation gave him cannot later pretend it never happened. A connected case, involving the same employee’s attempt to withdraw a second resignation from a different institution after a job opportunity elsewhere fell through, failed for a related but distinct reason.

Factual Background

B.S. Rawat joined Delhi Technological University as Assistant Registrar in 2010. In May 2016, he tendered his own resignation, then went further and asked the university to waive his notice period and accept the resignation earlier than he had originally proposed. The university did exactly that. The officer who signed the acceptance was, at the time, only holding additional charge as Vice Chancellor rather than being the university’s Board of Management, the body actually empowered under the university’s own statute to appoint and, by extension, accept resignations from administrative posts. Rawat was relieved on the date he himself had requested, and he accepted his no dues certificate, final pay certificate and experience certificate without objection.

Four months later, having in the meantime joined the National Institute of Technology, Calicut using the very experience certificate DTU had given him, Rawat wrote to DTU seeking to withdraw his resignation, arguing it had never been validly accepted. Shortly afterward, DTU’s Board of Management formally ratified the earlier acceptance, and DTU rejected the withdrawal request. Rawat challenged this in the Delhi High Court. A Single Judge quashed the university’s orders entirely and directed reinstatement with full back pay. On appeal, the Division Bench upheld reinstatement but denied back pay, since Rawat had in the meantime taken up other paid work. Both DTU and Rawat appealed further, DTU against reinstatement and Rawat against the denial of back pay.

A connected dispute arose at NITC itself. In November 2018, Rawat submitted a resignation there too, this time after first trying and failing to attach a condition allowing him to withdraw it before his relieving date, a condition the institute’s own rules did not permit. His unconditional resignation was accepted later that month. Days after that acceptance, Rawat, having been selected for a deputation with a Delhi municipal corporation, asked to withdraw it. NITC refused, giving reasons, and relieved him on schedule once his notice period ended. A Single Judge partly sided with Rawat, ordering reinstatement without back pay, but the Kerala High Court’s Division Bench reversed this entirely, upholding NITC’s refusal and denying Rawat any relief. Rawat brought this decision before the Supreme Court too, and both matters were heard together given how closely the underlying legal questions overlapped.

The Question for Determination

Two connected questions arose. In the DTU matter, did the university’s later, formal ratification of an acceptance originally signed by an officer who lacked authority to give it cure that defect, and if so, from what date did the cure take effect: only from the date of ratification, or retrospectively from the date of the original, unauthorised acceptance. That timing mattered directly, since Rawat’s attempt to withdraw came in the gap between the flawed acceptance and its later ratification.

In the NITC matter, the question was narrower: had Rawat’s resignation there taken legal effect before he tried to withdraw it, and if it had, was the institute entitled to refuse that withdrawal as a matter of discretion, given the timing and circumstances in which the request was made.

The Court’s Reasoning

On the DTU appeal, the Court agreed that the university’s Board of Management, not an officer holding mere additional charge as Vice Chancellor, was the only body with authority to accept a resignation from an administrative post. To that extent the High Court’s Division Bench had been correct. Where the Division Bench went wrong, the Court held, was in failing to work through what the Board’s later ratification of that flawed acceptance actually did to the timeline. Ratification, properly understood, does not simply approve a past act from the date of approval onward. It relates back to the date of the original act and validates it from inception, as though the proper authority had been involved from the start. Applying that principle, the Board’s ratification related back to the original acceptance in May, meaning that by the time the matter was fully resolved, there had never been a period in which an improperly accepted, still open resignation existed for Rawat to withdraw.

The Court went further and identified a second, independent reason the withdrawal could not succeed, one resting not on the technical cure of ratification but on the ordinary principle that a person cannot approbate and reprobate, accepting the advantages of a transaction while later denying the transaction ever validly occurred. Rawat had not merely resigned. He had asked for his own notice period to be shortened and for an earlier effective date than he had originally proposed, and the university had granted exactly that request. He had accepted every certificate that followed from a completed exit, and had then used the experience certificate DTU issued him to secure his next role at NITC. Only after that, and only once he sought to return, did he raise the question of who had signed the original acceptance, a defect he had neither noticed nor complained of for four months. On these facts, the Court held, the resignation had been consummated by Rawat’s own conduct, independent of any question about the ratification’s timing, and he could not later treat as void a transaction from which he had already taken full benefit.

On the NITC appeal, the Court held the resignation there took legal effect on the date it was accepted, not on the later date communication reached Rawat or the still later date his notice period expired. The institute’s own governing statute made this explicit, tying effectiveness to acceptance alone. Since the resignation was already legally effective before Rawat’s withdrawal request, and since the applicable rules gave the competent authority discretion to refuse a withdrawal request provided it gave reasons, the only remaining question was whether that discretion had been exercised properly. The Court found it had. Rawat’s own resignation letter had stated he was no longer interested in continuing at the institute, and his request to withdraw followed immediately upon his selection for an entirely different position elsewhere. The institute’s conclusion that the request was opportunistic rather than a genuine change of heart was a rational view a court exercising writ jurisdiction had no basis to override.

Both appeals in Rawat’s favour were dismissed. DTU’s appeal against reinstatement succeeded.

Critical Assessment

The ratification analysis is doctrinally tidy, but the timing point deserves closer attention than the judgment gives it. Rawat’s withdrawal letter was dated four days before the Board’s ratification actually took place. At the precise moment he wrote it, on the Court’s own account of how authority worked at the university, there was arguably still an improperly accepted resignation on the books, since the cure had not yet occurred. The Court’s answer is that ratification, once it happened, reached back and closed that gap entirely, so that with hindsight there was never a moment a valid withdrawal could have landed. That is a coherent application of relation back doctrine, but it produces a slightly uncomfortable result: an employee’s rights can depend on a governing body’s decision taken after the fact, one he had no way of anticipating and no ability to influence, retroactively determining whether an action he took days earlier was ever legally available to him at all.

That discomfort is considerably reduced by the second and independent basis the Court gives for its decision, and this is where the judgment is on its strongest ground. The approbation and reprobation reasoning does not depend on any technical question about when ratification took effect. It rests entirely on Rawat’s own conduct: requesting an earlier exit than he had proposed, accepting every benefit of that exit, and using the resulting certificate to secure his next job before ever questioning the resignation’s validity. That sequence of events would defeat his claim regardless of how the ratification timing question came out, and the Court is right to treat it as the more solid footing for its conclusion, even while also addressing the ratification point in full.

The two cases read together also say something worth naming about how these disputes tend to arise. In both DTU and NITC, Rawat’s request to withdraw followed closely on the heels of a specific alternative opportunity, first taking up work at NITC, then seeking a deputation with a municipal corporation, rather than following any general reconsideration of his career independent of those opportunities. Neither court treated this pattern as improper in principle. An employee is entitled to change his mind for whatever reason he likes, in the ordinary case. Both institutions, and ultimately the Supreme Court, treated the closeness in time between an alternative opportunity and a withdrawal request as a legitimate basis for scepticism about whether the request reflected a genuine change of heart or simply reflected which door currently looked more attractive, a distinction that matters more to how these cases are actually decided than the formal legal tests might suggest on their own.

Implications

If you’re not a lawyer: if you resign from a job, and especially if you ask your employer to shorten your own notice period or bring your exit date forward, accepting the resulting paperwork, your final pay, your dues clearance, your experience certificate, and especially using that certificate to get your next job, will likely be treated as you having accepted the resignation as final. This holds even if there later turns out to have been some technical flaw in how it was processed on the employer’s end. If you want to keep the door open to changing your mind, say so clearly and promptly, and do not use the benefits of leaving until you are certain you want to.

For the profession: this case usefully separates two routes by which an employer can defeat a challenge to an improperly accepted resignation, and practitioners should plead both where the facts allow. The first is formal ratification, which the Court confirms operates retrospectively under the settled principle that a subsequent ratification is equivalent to prior authority, curing a defect of authority but never an act that was independently void or unlawful. The second, independent of any ratification, is the ordinary doctrine against approbation and reprobation, which succeeds or fails on the employee’s own conduct after the resignation, whether benefits were accepted, whether the certificate was used, and how much time passed before any objection was raised. The judgment also confirms, via the NITC appeal, that where a governing statute ties the effectiveness of a resignation to acceptance alone rather than to communication or the expiry of a notice period, an employer’s discretion to refuse a subsequent withdrawal request, provided it is exercised with recorded reasons, will attract only limited review under Article 226, particularly where the timing of the withdrawal request suggests it was prompted by a specific alternative opportunity rather than genuine reconsideration.

Case Details

  • Citation: 2026 INSC 797, Civil Appeal Nos. 9308-9309 of 2024, with Special Leave Petition (C) Nos. 625-626 of 2021
  • Court: Supreme Court of India, Civil Appellate Jurisdiction. Pamidighantam Sri Narasimha J and Alok Aradhe J
  • On appeal from: Judgment dated 08.08.2022 of the High Court of Delhi in L.P.A. No. 68 of 2022, and judgment dated 01.12.2020 of the High Court of Kerala in W.A. Nos. 809 and 816 of 2020
  • Decided: 4 August 2026
  • Key precedents applied: Sri Parmeshwari Prasad Gupta v Union of India, (1973) 2 SCC 543 · Union of India v Gopal Chandra Misra, (1978) 2 SCC 301 · Municipal Commissioner, Jamnagar Municipal Corporation v R.M. Doshi, (2024) 20 SCC 742 · Reichel v Bishop of Oxford, (1889) 14 AC 259 · Raj Kumar v Union of India, AIR 1969 SC 180
  • Key paragraphs: [19] (the six principles of the doctrine of ratification) · [20]-[24] (the independent ground: approbation and reprobation) · [27]-[29] (the NITC appeal: effectiveness of resignation and discretion to refuse withdrawal)