M/s Bharat Coking Coal Limited & Ors. v. Shyam Kishore Singh
Background
An employee of a coal company had a date of birth of 04.03.1950 recorded in his service records from the day he joined in 1982, a date he himself repeatedly confirmed in forms over the years, including a 1998 Provident Fund nomination form. Only in 2009, just before his 2010 retirement, did he ask to have his date of birth corrected to 20.01.1955 based on his school certificate. The company rejected this, but four years after retiring, he challenged the rejection in the Jharkhand High Court. A Single Judge and then a Division Bench partly ruled in his favour, ordering the company to accept the corrected date (with some reduction in the back-benefits awarded). The company appealed to the Supreme Court.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that a request to correct one's recorded date of birth made at the "fag end" of service, here, after roughly three decades of accepting the earlier date as correct, including in his own signed forms, cannot ordinarily be entertained, regardless of whether the school-certificate date might in fact be accurate. The Court cited a long line of its own precedents holding that such late corrections disrupt seniority and promotion chains for other employees and that an employee who "sleeps over" his rights cannot claim correction as of right. Since the employee had an opportunity in 1987 to correct his records and again confirmed the same date in 1998, and only raised the issue in 2009, his claim was held unsustainable. The High Court's orders were set aside and the company's appeal was allowed.
Lesson Learnt
If your official date of birth is wrong in your service records, raise it and get it corrected as early as possible: courts are very reluctant to allow a correction requested only near retirement, even with good supporting documents, because of the disruptive effect on colleagues' careers and promotions.