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Rajnish Kumar Rai vs. Union of India

Special Leave Petition (Civil) · 2023 INSC 862Decided 6 Sept 2023
Special Leave Petition (Civil) No. 20054 of 2023
Aniruddha Bose · Bela M. Trivedi

Background

The petitioner had himself filed his original case before the Central Administrative Tribunal's Hyderabad bench, but after it reached the final hearing stage, he sought to have it transferred to the Ahmedabad bench since he had relocated there after retirement. The Tribunal's Principal Bench in Delhi rejected the transfer, and the Gujarat High Court dismissed his challenge to that rejection, relying on the Supreme Court's earlier ruling in Union of India v. Alapan Bandyopadhyay that only the High Court within whose territory the Tribunal's Principal Bench sits can review such transfer orders.

Decision Breakdown

The Court noted that although a coordinate Bench had referred the correctness of the Alapan Bandyopadhyay ruling to a larger Bench in a separate case, no larger Bench had yet decided the point, so judicial propriety required following the existing precedent. Independently examining the merits anyway (in case it wished to invoke its special powers under Article 142), the Court found no real hardship justifying the transfer: the petitioner himself had originally chosen the Hyderabad bench, that case had already reached the final hearing stage, and mere post-retirement relocation and inconvenience were not sufficient grounds to disturb that. The special leave petition was accordingly dismissed.

Lesson Learnt

Courts are reluctant to transfer a case away from a tribunal bench the litigant originally chose, especially once the case is close to conclusion: personal inconvenience from a later relocation is not, by itself, sufficient grounds for a transfer.

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

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