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Government of India & Ors. v. Sitakant S. Dubhashi & Anr.

Civil Appeal · 2020 INSC 169Decided 11 Feb 2020
Civil Appeal No. 987 of 2020
Justice Ashok Bhushan · Justice Navin Sinha

Background

A participant in the 1954-55 "Phase II" of the Goa Liberation Movement applied for a Central Government freedom fighters' pension under a special relaxed scheme the Government of India introduced in 2003 for that group. The 2003 scheme required that the applicant must already have been granted a State pension by 1 August 2002. The respondent's claim for a State pension had initially been rejected in 2002, and he was only granted the State pension years later, in 2008, after Goa reopened its freedom fighters' scheme. The Central Government therefore rejected his claim for the Central pension for missing the cut-off date. He challenged this in the Bombay High Court (Goa Bench), which ruled in his favour since the Government had failed to file any reply explaining the cut-off date's rationale. The Government appealed to the Supreme Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court allowed the Government to file additional affidavits explaining why the cut-off date of 1 August 2002 had been fixed, and these showed it was a deliberate policy choice, made at a high-level meeting chaired by the Deputy Prime Minister, to keep the scheme's expansion from becoming open-ended, given roughly 3,500 potentially eligible claimants across several states. The Court held this cut-off had a rational basis and a genuine link to the scheme's purpose, so it did not violate equality rights, since the eligibility rules for the separate State pension and the Central SSSP pension scheme were different in nature. Since the respondent only received his State pension in 2008, after the cut-off, he did not qualify, and his later grant of pension could not be read back to any earlier date. The Supreme Court set aside the High Court's judgment and dismissed the respondent's writ petition.

Lesson Learnt

A government can impose a reasonable cut-off date when extending a welfare benefit to a wider group, provided the date was chosen for a genuine, demonstrable reason (such as controlling scheme size), and a claimant cannot get the benefit of an expanded scheme retroactively just because a related but separate state-level benefit was eventually granted to them later.

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

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