PANKAJ KUMAR GANGULY Vs. BANK OF INDIA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The only question involved in this appeal is whether Sinha, J., was right, in quashing by a writ of certiorari an order of the Labour Appellate Tribunal on the ground that the Tribunal had no jurisdiction to entertain the appeal in which the order had been made and had wrongly decided that it had such jurisdiction. The appellants contended that in so quashing the Tribunal's order, the learned Judge had himself assumed a jurisdiction which he did not possess under Article 223 of the Constitution and that his decision on the question of the Tribunal's jurisdiction was also wrong on the merits.

(2.) The appeal has arisen out of an industrial dispute between the Bank of India and 13 out of its 87 probationary temporary employees in its office at Calcutta. The facts of the dispute have been set out by the learned Judge in careful detail, but for the purposes of the present appeal it is necessary to late only a few of them. It appears that on and from the 24th December 1951, there was a strike In the Calcutta of lice of the Bank of "India, during which all the local employees, except only 24 of the 37 probationary or temporary ones, remained absent from duty. While the strike was still in progress, notices of discharge were served on the remaining 13 of the probationary or temporary employees on the ground that they had failed to report for duty in spite of special notices being issued to them, both before and after the commencement of the strike, to attend office and help in the annual closing of accounts. Subsequently, on the 7th January 1952, the strike was called off on the intervention of Government, but the Bank refused to take back the 13 dismissed employees. An agreement was then reached that the cases of those 13 would be referred to an Industrial Tribunal for adjudication and, in due course, Government referred the dispute to a single-member Tribunal constituted of one Mr. K. Section Campbell Puri. The terms of the reference were that the Tribunal should decide whether the termination of the services, of the 13 employees had been justified and if not, what relief should be accorded to them.

(3.) The strike was a legal strike. Not unnaturally, therefore, the Bank appears to have been anxious to make out before the Tribunal that the 13 employees had not been discharged for their participation in the strike but they had been discharged on account of indiscipline and breach of promise, inasmuch as, having assured the management that they would attend office during the period of the strike, they had failed to carry out that assurance. The case of the employees was that they had been prevented from entering the premises of the Bank by the intense picketing carried on near the gate. The Tribunal held that the 13 employees had either participated in the strike or had been prevented from going to their work by the admitted picketing, but whichever might have been the cause of their absence from duty, the termination of their services had been unjustified.