Kamal Ghorui
NEW DELHI: In what will benefit hundreds of women short service commission officers, Supreme Court on Tuesday said arbitrariness in assessment of their ACRs, written at a time when they were ineligible for permanent commission (PC), resulted in unfair denial of PC and ordered the armed forces to pay full pension to them.Six years after the landmark judgment making women short service commission officers (WSSCOs) eligible for PC, a bench of CJI Surya Kant and Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and N K Singh said, “ACRs of appellant-SSCWOs were authored with the assumption that they would never undergo any substantive career progression, owing to their ineligibility for PC for the initial 10 years of service.”
Writing separate judgments for WSSCOs in Army, Navy and IAF, CJI Kant said, “Since the avenue for PC was opened to them much later, this presumption undermined the entire assessment of their ‘suitability’ for any career progression undertaken prior to that and, thus, adversely affected their overall merit in the consideration for PC. “We find that denial of PC to WSSCOs was not merely the outcome of individual assessments, but the consequence of a systemic framework rooted in assumptions that entrenched disadvantages in career progression.” The top court bench made the comment after accepting majority of the submissions by amicus curiae and senior advocate Rekha Palli.Invoking its extraordinary powers under Article 142 of the Constitution, the SC said the women SSCOs who have approached the apex court and who have been released from service during pendency of the litigation, “shall be deemed to have completed substantive qualifying service of 20 years and shall be entitled to pension and all consequential benefits, except arrears of pay, on the basis that they have completed such minimum service”.“The pension shall be fixed on the basis of the date of completion of deemed service of 20 years, but arrears thereof, if any, shall be paid to the WSSCOs only with effect from Jan 1, 2025,” the top court said but excluded women SSCOs in Judge Advocate General and Army Engineering Corps (AEC) from this benefit saying they were eligible for PC since 2010.The bench further directed, “All WSSCOs who are continuing in service by virtue of SC orders dated May 9 and May 19 last year, and who have fulfilled the minimum cut-off grade of 60% in the regular selection boards held in 2020 and 2021, shall be entitled to permanent commission, subject to their meeting the medical criteria and on receiving disciplinary and vigilance clearance.”
