DA a legal right of state govt employees, rules HC

Kolkata: The Calcutta High Court on Friday held that dearness allowance is a legal right of state government employees, thereby

setting aside the order of a State Administrative Tribunal (SAT) that had said that DA cannot be claimed as a right by the state government employees.

A division bench of Justices Debasish Kar Gupta and Sekhar Bobby Saraf directed the SAT to rehear the case and take a decision on the employees' claim for DA, taking into account the central government DA rates.

The bench also directed the

tribunal to hear the issues relating to the rates of DA to be paid to

the employees expeditiously and

to conclude hearing of the matter within two months, excluding holidays.

Advocate Amjad Ali, on behalf of the petitioner Confederation of State Government Employees, said: "There were two matters in which the court had to decide. The first was to decide whether the state government employees will be entitled to get DA on par with the Central government and the second one was whether the state government was justified to pay differential rates to its employees posted at Delhi and Chennai. The High Court has referred both of these matters to SAT."

It cannot be said that employees in Kolkata were affected differently

by inflation compared to those

posted in Delhi or Chennai, the

court added.

The division bench has directed the state government to file an affidavit before SAT within three weeks and allowed the petitioners the liberty to file their reply to the state government's affidavit within another week after that.

During the argument of the case that went on for 17 months, the state's advocate general had claimed that DA was not a right of the employees, but a benevolence on the part of the government.

The notification declaring a total additional dearness allowance (DA) of 25 percent has been issued on Thursday. There will also be an ad-hoc increase in the existing daily rate of wages by Rs 53 from January 1 in 2019.