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Bharat Coking Coal v. Chhota Birsa Uranw

Civil Appeal · Neutral citation not assigned (Civil Appeal No. 4890 of 2014)Decided 25 Apr 2014
Civil Appeal No. 4890 of 2014
Justice Gyan Sudha Misra · Justice Pinaki Chandra Ghose

Background

A coal-company employee's service register recorded a different birth date from his school and mining certificates. He requested correction in 1987 during the employer's record-verification exercise, but the birth-date issue remained unresolved. When retirement was later ordered on the disputed service entry, he obtained a High Court direction for an inquiry, which the employer challenged.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court dismissed the employer's appeal and affirmed the High Court's directions and reasoning. This was not a new claim raised at retirement: the employee had used the prescribed correction opportunity almost twenty years earlier. The company had to follow its own Implementation Instruction No.76 rather than treating his signature on the disputed register as conclusive. The Court also accepted the genuineness of the school certificate and explained that a later-issued copy could reflect school records predating employment; it did not itself conduct a fresh birth-date determination.

Lesson Learnt

Report a service-record error promptly through the employer's prescribed process and retain proof. An employer cannot rely on its own failure to resolve an earlier correction request to dismiss the dispute as a last-minute retirement claim.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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