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State of Chhattisgarh and Anr. v. Karishna Kumar Kashyap

Civil Appeal · Neutral citation not assigned (Civil Appeal No. 5813 of 2017)Decided 1 May 2017
Civil Appeal No. 5813 of 2017
Justice Kurian Joseph · Justice R. Banumathi

Background

A batch of workmen had been granted relief by the Labour Court, which the State of Chhattisgarh challenged in the High Court. A Single Judge of the High Court drew a distinction between workmen who had completed ten years of service and those with less than ten years, interfering with the Labour Court's award only for the latter group. A Division Bench reversed the Single Judge, holding that length of service beyond the statutory threshold was not the correct test. The State then appealed to the Supreme Court against the Division Bench's order, and by the time of the hearing the workmen had continued working for years under the award.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that the Single Judge's classification based on ten years of service was legally unsustainable; the only relevant question under the Industrial Disputes Act is whether a workman completed 240 days of continuous service within a 12-month period, and the Division Bench had correctly corrected this error. The Court also noted that a coordinate Bench had already decided an identical issue on similar facts in a related appeal, declining to interfere with the Labour Court's award. Observing that the workmen had continued working for a considerable time since the award, the Court dismissed all the State's appeals, while clarifying that if the State genuinely lacked sufficient work to accommodate them, it remained free to take appropriate steps under the Industrial Disputes Act.

Lesson Learnt

Eligibility for protection against retrenchment under labour law turns on the specific statutory test, 240 days of continuous service in a year, not on open-ended judicial distinctions like a minimum number of years served; courts will apply the test uniformly across workmen in the same situation.

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

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