Sakina Tashrifwala
Published on: September 17, 2022 at 18:16 IST
The government informed the Supreme Court on Friday that the process of re-fixing pensions is “time consuming,” therefore it gave the Centre till December to execute the One Rank One Pension (OROP) scheme.
In June, just days before the deadline set by the Supreme Court in its decision of March 16 approving the OROP plan, the Centre filed a request for a three-month extension.
The Centre’s application was approved by a bench of Justices Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud and Hima Kohli, who noted that some progress had been achieved since the order’s issuance.
According to the application, the government was “taking sincere steps” to abide by the court’s orders, which call for Cabinet approval. This gave the bench comfort.
It was mentioned that a cabinet note had been written and the required inter-ministerial consultations were finished. The cabinet note will be sent to the Cabinet Secretariat for approval after all other requirements are finished.
The Centre stated in its appeal that the Controller General of Defence Accounts (CGDA), which is a time-consuming process, will need to compile several types of pension tables after the Cabinet approves them.
Even though this application was filed three months ago, the government still needed another three months, Additional Solicitor General (ASG) N Venkataraman told the court.
The bench agreed to extend the deadline until December 31 at the Centre’s request, but later changed it to three months from today.
By December 15, the three-month period will be over.
The initial petitioner in the case, the Indian Ex-Servicemen Movement, who contested the OROP programme before the Supreme Court in 2016, disagreed with the request for additional time.
Senior attorney Huzefa Ahmadi and attorney Balaji Srinivasan spoke before the court on behalf of the petitioners, claiming that retired members of the military services have been denied the arrears due to them under the OROP since its launch on November 7, 2015.
The plan called for re-fixation of the pension every five years. Since the case was still pending in court, the process that was supposed to be completed in 2019 never happened.
In their ruling from March, the court stated.
“We order and direct that, in terms of the communication dated November 7, 2015, a re-fixation exercise shall be carried out from July 1, 2019, upon the expiry of five years. Arrears payable to all eligible pensioners of the armed forces shall be computed and paid over accordingly within a period of three months.”
The petitioner organisation and specific ex-servicemen challenged the OROP on two different grounds. They also contested the arbitrary cut-off date of July 1, 2014, for determining pensions, which disadvantaged retirees before this date.
They sought an automatic modification of the pension instead of a five-year periodic revision.
The court rejected the petitioners’ two demands because it believed the problem was solely one of policy.
According to information provided to the court by the government, the expected budget allocation for defence pensions is Rs. 1,33,825 crores, or 28.39% of the estimated Rs. 4,71,378 crore overall defence budget for 2020–2021. The salary budget, which represents 34.89% of the estimated overall defence expenditure for 2020–2021, is not included in this.
In its ruling, the court emphasised that salaries and pensions made up 63% of the defence budget forecasts for 2020–2021, and that the government was within its rights to modify the distribution of financial benefits and take into account military modernization priorities.