Prohibition under Section 10 of the CLRA Act does not confer automatic absorption

The issuance of an official notification under Section 10(1) of the Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act, 1970 prohibiting the employment of contract labour in a particular process, operation, or establishment does not entail an automatic legal absorption of the contract workers into the direct employment of the principal employer. Section 10 is an exclusively regulatory and prohibitory provision designed to bar the future deployment of contract labour, backed by specific penal sanctions under Sections 23 and 25 for non-compliance, without creating a substantive positive right of automatic absorption. Courts cannot supply statutory omissions or read consequences into an enactment that the legislature deliberately excluded. Consequently, upon the issuance of a prohibition notification, a genuine contract labourer does not automatically become an employee of the principal employer; the contractor is merely prohibited from supplying them, and the workers remain the employees of the contractor who may deploy them elsewhere. (M/S Premium Transmission Private Limited Vs The State of Maharashtra and Others | 2026 INSC 87).