Supreme Court dismisses petition seeking review of its verdict upholding OROP policy for defence forces

Satya Prakash

New Delhi, July 29

The Supreme Court has dismissed a petition seeking review of its verdict upholding the Centre’s One Rank-One Pension (OROP) scheme for the armed forces.

“We have carefully gone through the review petition and the connected papers. We find no merit in the review petition and the same is accordingly dismissed,” a three-judge Bench led by Justice DY Chandrachud said in its July 26 order.

“The Central government has taken a policy decision. Such a decision lies within the ambit of policy making powers of the government. We do not find any constitutional infirmity on the OROP principle and the notification dated November 7, 2015,” it had said in its March 16 verdict.

Rejecting petitioner Indian Ex-servicemen Movement’s petition it had said there was limited scope of judicial review of policy decisions taken by the Executive in such matters and directed that the re-fixation exercise in terms of the OROP policy should be carried out from July 1, 2019 and arrears should be paid to the beneficiaries within three months.

Maintaining that the definition of OROP was uniformly applicable to all the pensioners irrespective of the date of retirement, the Bench had concluded that the definition of OROP was not arbitrary and said there was no legal mandate that pensioners with the same rank must be given the same pension.

The top court said, “…if the maximum salary drawn is to be used as the base value instead of taking the average salary, an additional outlay of Rs 1,45,339.34 crore would be incurred. The executive (Government) is therefore, well within its limits to prescribe a policy keeping in view the financial implications.”

The top court had clarified that its verdicts in DS Nakara case and SPS Vains case can’t be understood to have mandated OROP.

The Centre had contended that both ‘same rank’ and ‘same length of service’ were necessary conditions for availing of OROP benefits.

During the hearing, the Bench had faulted the government, saying “The problem is your hyperbole on the OROP policy presented a much rosier picture than what is actually given to the pensioners.”

In its affidavit, the Ministry of Defence had said petitioner’s contention on OROP defeated one of the core values of the OROP — which was not only same rank but with the same length of service.