Bengaluru: Coming to the rescue of a retired professor of law who had served two universities for 28 years and was still denied pension, the Dharwad bench of Karnataka high court has directed the state govt to pay him Rs 1 lakh in litigation costs apart from paying 12% interest upon the (pension) amounts payable to him.“The state must understand that pension is not a bounty or a favour to be dispensed at its convenience, but a lawful entitlement to be honoured when it falls due. A retired employee cannot be compelled to spend the evening of his life in the corridors of litigation, seeking what ought to have reached him as a matter of course,” a division bench comprising Justices M Nagaprasanna and Hema Kulkarni strongly observed in its order passed on Oct 12.Chidananda Reddy S Patil had joined Karnatak University, Dharwad (KUD), as a lecturer in March 1996. In July 2013, he joined Karnataka State Law University as a professor and resigned from the associate professor’s post he was holding at KUD. On Dec 31, 2024, he superannuated from service.However, he was denied pension by the authorities on the premise that the service rendered by him in KUD between 1996 and 2013 could not be considered for determining his eligibility under the old pension scheme. Their stand was that, notwithstanding his initial entry into service in 1996, and his subsequent movement to the law university, Hubballi, through a technical resignation, he must be brought within the fold of the new pension scheme. This forced him to approach the high court.On March 17 this year, the high court ruled in his favour and directed the authorities to pay pension under the old pension scheme. The state govt had appealed against the order.Its main argument was that since Patil had served in KUD, an autonomous institution, the period cannot, as a matter of course, be imported into the service rendered in another institution for the purpose of determining pensionary entitlement under the old pension scheme. The authorities, however, conceded that Patil was not paid any pension, either under the old or the new pension scheme.The division bench pointed out that nearly 17 years of service rendered in KUD cannot be treated as a mere historical footnote in the respondent’s service career.“The law cannot permit an employee’s past service to be acknowledged when it benefits the administration, yet disowned when it becomes the foundation of his pensionary claim. The respondent’s rights, founded upon his entry into service long before the introduction of the new pension scheme and preserved by the applicable service rules, cannot be defeated by treating his subsequent appointment as an event that extinguished his earlier service. The inevitable conclusion, therefore, is that the respondent is entitled to have his pensionary benefits determined under the old pension scheme and not the new pension scheme, reckoning the qualifying service rendered by him in both universities in accordance with law,” the division bench added while dismissing the govt’s appeal.
