SHYAM NARAYAN SINGH Vs. STATE OF MAHARASHTRA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) IS it conscionable for the State to commence criminal proceedings against a subordinate employee of the Telephone Department in the year 1978, carry on investigations for three years and thereafter suspend him in a state of limbo with no end in after the lapse of 15 years? Round one of the litigation is yet to commence, leave alone conclude, and the inevitable appeal which is bound to follow, since the state invariably challenges even orders of acquittal would take the proceedings well into the next century. Is this situation in consonance with the Constitutional guarantee enshrined in Art. 21 can it be allowed to pass or is the petitioner before me justified in his plea that this Court must quash the proceeding and set him at liberty? That his rights have been curtailed and that his liberty has also been infringed upon through a procedure prescribed by law cannot be denied, but to my mind when that very law prescribes that the process must be completed within a fair period of time, any breach of that requirement will have to be to the advantage of the petitioner First the facts.

(2.) THE petitioner joined the Telephone Department in Bombay in the year 1967 and was promoted to the post of Assistant Engineer in the year 1979. In the year 1978, when he was working as Assistant in the Borivili Telephone Exchange, he was required to verify original records and documents annexed to an application for a subscriber Dr. Miss Shah for a new telephone connection. It is pertinent to point out that the functions ascribed to the petitioner were that he was required to verify the correctness of the copies of documents submitted to the Department from the original records. It was not his duty to do any field investigations and to go out and physically check up whether the contents of the documents in question are, infact, correct. Briefly stated, original accused No. 2 Radhakrishnan Bhatia in collusion with original accused No. 3 Ajay Kumar Vakharia are alleged to have submitted certain documents in support of the application for the telephone connection in the name of Miss Shah, which indicated that the doctor in question had taken on rent one room in the flat of accused No. 2 and that she had paid certain amounts against the same. These documents portrayed the picture to the Department that Dr. Shah was, in fact, residing in that flat and that since she was a doctor, and was eligible for a telephone which, in turn, came to be sanctioned. All the payments in respect of the telephone connection were made including the rental etc. The Department, however, received a complaint to the effect that Dr. (Miss) Shah was, in fact, dead at the relevant time and that her signatures had been forged on the original documents.

(3.) THE matter was reported to the Central Bureau of Investigations, who commenced an investigation and found out that this position was true, that the signatures of Dr. (Miss) Shah on the original application had been forged, that the so-called rent receipts had been fabricated by accused Nos. 2 and 3 and in these circumstances the present petitioner, who had verified the copies of the documents submitted to the Department from the originals was also made a party to the investigation. He was placed under suspension and on the Central Bureau of Investigations filing a chargesheet for offence of criminal conspiracy, forgery and user of the forged documents, the present petitioner along with the two other accused were put up for trial before the learned Sessions Judge, Greater Bombay, in Criminal Case No. 30 of 1981.