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Shri Ram Shridhar Chimurkar vs Union of India & Anr.

Civil Appeal · 2023 INSC 49Decided 17 Jan 2023
Civil Appeal No. 386 of 2023
K.M. Joseph · B.V. Nagarathna · V. Ramasubramanian

Background

Shridhar Chimurkar, a Superintendent in the National Sample Survey Organisation at Nagpur, retired in 1993 and died childless in 1994. In April 1996 his widow, Maya Motghare, adopted Shri Ram (the appellant), and in 1998 she remarried and moved to Delhi. In 2000 the appellant claimed family pension as the deceased employee's adopted son; the government refused. The Central Administrative Tribunal ruled in his favour in 2002, reasoning that under the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act, 1956 a widow's adoption is deemed to be an adoption by her late husband too, but the Bombay High Court (Nagpur Bench) reversed this in 2015.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal and upheld the High Court. It accepted that under Hindu law a child adopted by a widow does become, in law, the child of her deceased husband (Sawan Ram, Sitabai). But those rights operate only within the adoptive family; they do not automatically translate into a claim on the public exchequer under pension rules, which must be read on their own terms. The phrase "family in relation to a government servant" in Rule 54(14)(b) requires a direct, not remote, connection: the listed relatives (spouse, children, dependent parents, disabled siblings) are people who had a familial relationship with, and were dependent on, the employee during his lifetime. Family pension exists to support those left destitute by the employee's death (Poonamal), so "adopted legally" must mean adopted by the employee during his or her lifetime, not by the surviving spouse afterwards, otherwise the provision could be abused. A posthumous biological child is different, because the employee did have a relationship with that child.

Lesson Learnt

A child adopted by a government servant's widow after his death may be his son or daughter under Hindu law, but is not entitled to family pension: pension rules protect only those who were part of the employee's family during his lifetime.

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

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