The Supreme Court has held that a railway servant does not cease to be a member of the civil service of the Union merely because his conditions of service are regulated by rules specific to the Railways, LawStreet Journal reported.

Source: LawStreet Journal

Deciding a batch of appeals by a former Junior Draftsman in the Indian Railways who later joined the Kerala State Electricity Board (KSEB) as a Sub-Engineer, a bench of Justices Dipankar Datta and Satish Chandra Sharma ruled that service in the Indian Railways must be reckoned as Central Government service for computing qualifying service and granting weightage in pay fixation.

The appellant joined the Railways in 1990 and served more than ten years of regular pensionable service before being relieved in 2001 to join the Board. The Railways remitted an amount towards pro-rata pension liability, and the Board's own 1996 order provided that regular pensionable Central Government service followed by Board service would count for weightage — a position repeated in Long Term Settlements in 2000 and 2007, according to the report.

In 2012, however, the Board's Chief Internal Auditor objected to the fixation, cancelled the weightage and ordered recovery of the alleged excess, on the sole ground that railway service could not be reckoned as Central Government service. The employee's representations were rejected and he approached the Kerala High Court.

The Court rejected the Board's narrow reading, noting that the Railways Act, 1989 defines a railway servant as a person employed by the Central Government, and that the Board was estopped from withdrawing benefits after accepting the pension contribution and acting on its own settlements, LawChronicle reported in its account of the judgment in Bency John v. Kerala State Electricity Board Ltd.

Source: LawChronicle