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State Bank of Patiala v. Pritam Singh Bedi

Civil Appeal · Neutral citation not assigned (Civil Appeal No. 172 of 2010)Decided 7 Jul 2014
Civil Appeal No. 172 of 2010
Justice Sudhansu Jyoti Mukhopadhaya · Justice V. Gopala Gowda

Background

Bank employees took voluntary retirement after serving more than nineteen years and six months but less than twenty years. The bank denied pension because it treated them as short of the twenty-year requirement. The High Court ordered payment, and the bank appealed.

Decision Breakdown

The Court dismissed the bank's appeals and upheld pension entitlement. Regulation 18 required a broken period exceeding six months to be counted as a full year, so these employees had twenty years of qualifying service. They therefore qualified for the voluntary-retirement pension provisions in Regulation 29. Decisions involving employees with much shorter service did not defeat their claims because they had not addressed this rounding rule. The conclusion depended on the bank's pension regulations and the employees' actual qualifying service.

Lesson Learnt

Check how pension rules count incomplete years before accepting that service falls short of eligibility. A specific rounding provision can turn more than nineteen-and-a-half years into twenty qualifying years.

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

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