Apex Court allows pensionary benefits to women SSC officers

New Delhi: The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that women Short Service Commission (SSC) officers in the Army, Navy, and Air Force denied permanent commission due to a “systemic disparity” would be entitled to full pensionary benefits.

The top court delivered three separate verdicts challenging the denial of PC (permanent commission) based on policy changes in 2019 and previous Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) rulings in the Army, Air Force, and Navy.

In the verdict on a plea by Yogendra Kumar Singh related to the Navy, a bench comprising Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi granted PC to several groups of SSC Officers, primarily women, as a one-time measure.

The bench set aside the need for yet another selection board, noting that the officers had been subjected to three gruelling rounds of litigation over 15 years.

The dispute pertained to how the Navy assessed its officers and the appellants, around 25 officers, said that their annual confidential reports (ACRs) were “casually graded” during the years they were technically ineligible for PC.

“We are of the considered opinion that when officers are assessed under the prevailing assumption that they have no future in the service, the appraisal process is inevitably affected from its very inception,” the verdict said and termed this a “circularity” where past ineligibility was unfairly transformed into “deemed unsuitability” for career progression.

As a one-time measure, the bench directed grant of PC to in-service Short Service Commission Women Officers (SSCWOs) inducted prior to January 2009 and SSCWOs who joined after January 2009 in branches excluding law, education, and naval architecture.

In its second judgment on a plea by Lt Col Pooja Pal related to the Army, the bench ordered the grant of PC to several batches of women officers and directed the government to provide pensionary benefits to those who were released from service during the legal battle.

It ruled that the Army’s evaluation process for women officers was “marred by inequality of opportunity” and rooted in a “systemic framework” of discrimination.

The 60-page judgment focused on a group of roughly 73 SSC officers, mostly women, from batches commissioned between 2010 and 2012.

It found that for the first decade of their careers, these women were considered “ineligible” for PC as a matter of policy and, consequently, their ACRs were written by superior officers who assumed the women would only serve a 14-year term.

This led to “casual” or “middling” grades, while their male counterparts were groomed and graded higher for long-term career progression, the court said.

Writing the judgments, the CJI compared the flawed evaluation to “adjusting the lens of a camera to alter the quality of an image captured much earlier”, stating, “The damage had been done years before.”

The Army had argued that it could only grant 250 PC slots per year to maintain a “youngish” profile of the force.

However, the court rejected the idea that this cap was “sacrosanct” or “immutable”, saying that the 250-vacancy ceiling had been breached several times in the past for exigencies such as the Kargil war.

“The invocation of the vacancy cap as a shield against remedial action would be unfair to sustain,” it held.