14 years after death of a Punjab Special Forces soldier in J-K operations, mother gets liberalised pension
Vijay Mohan
Chandigarh, December 28
About 14 years after her son, a soldier serving with the Special Forces in Jammu and Kashmir, died while on operational deployment, his aged mother has finally been granted liberalised family pension after judicial intervention by the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT).
Naik Kulwinder Singh, who belonged to Ropar district, was deployed in Operation Rakshak, and was undergoing an operational preparedness activity in a designated high altitude counter-insurgency area for an ensuing task near Gulmarg when the team was hit by a huge avalanche.
The team leader, Captain Prateek Puntambekar, and 16 other ranks were killed in the incident.
While the Army had declared the deaths as “battle casualty”, the Defence Accounts Department refused to release liberalised family pension, which is applicable to deaths in operational areas, to the widows of the married deceased soldiers and to the parents of the unmarried soldiers, despite several requests by military authorities.
The father of Captain Puntambekar, had approached the Principal Bench of the AFT at New Delhi in 2013 for relief.
During pendency of his petition, the Defence Accounts Department itself released liberalised family pension to him in January 2014, after which the AFT directed the government to pay 12 percent interest on the arrears for unjustifiably denying the due pension to the father of the late officer.
Despite releasing liberalised family pension to the family of the officer on their own, the Defence Accounts Department continued denying the same benefit to the families of the deceased soldiers of lower ranks, including Gurdial Kaur, the mother of Naik Kulwinder Singh.
Observing that “discrimination is apparent on the face of the record”, the Tribunal’s Bench comprising Justice Sudhir Mittal and Air Marshal Manavendra Singh, has now directed the government to release liberalised family pension to the mother of the late soldier along with 12 percent interest with effect from the date of his death.
