Employee must have chance to defend termination order based on allegations: Delhi HC
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New Delhi: The Delhi High Court ruled that an employee's services cannot be terminated without giving him or her a chance to present a defence if a termination decision is based on allegations since such an action is stigmatising and untenable.
In its May 1 order, Justice Jyoti Singh's single-judge court read through numerous decisions on the subject and noted that if an order “is founded on allegations, the order is stigmatic and punitive and services of an employee cannot be dispensed with without affording him an opportunity of defending the accusations/allegations made against him in a full-fledged inquiry”.
On April 24, 2018, the court overturned the decision to fire Nina Lath Gupta, who was serving her third five-year term as managing director of the National Film Development Corporation, Indian Express reported.
The HC ruled that Gupta is entitled to a refund of all money that was taken from her for HRA and other benefits during the remaining portion of her tenure (two years and 11 months), and it also ordered the central government to settle any outstanding debts for salary and other benefits within eight weeks.
The termination order from 2018 was challenged by Gupta, who claimed that her services had been "illegally terminated as being cloaked as an order simplicitor" and that it was based on stigmatising "allegations of misconduct" that were made without giving her a chance to be heard or without conducting an inquiry into the alleged misconduct, which is against the National Film Development Corporation's service rules.
The court made a comment regarding stigma, saying that the term is "a matter for moral reproach" as commonly understood.
The HC held that in tenure employment if the termination order of the employee is an order simplicitor and casts no stigma, “it warrants no interference by the court”. But if the circumstances lead to a conclusion that “termination is founded on allegations, then being penal in nature, the order would be untenable in law if issued without affording an opportunity to the employee to defend the accusations,” Justice Singh observed.
After examining the termination order, the court held that the order was “founded on allegations and was not an innocuous or a simplicitor order” of termination.
“In order to wriggle out of the legal implications that would have been a fall out of the stigmatic order, the order was withdrawn, however, as rightly pointed out by the petitioner, the allegations were not wiped out and despite the omission of paragraph 2 thereof, the impugned order is a camouflage and founded on the same allegations, as admittedly, there was no fresh or any other reason/ trigger for truncating the five-year tenure. Minus the allegations, there is no cause for termination as it is nobody’s case that the petitioner was otherwise unsuitable for the job,” the bench said.
