SC asks West Bengal govt to pay 25% outstanding DA owed to state employees
A division bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and Manoj Misra had earlier suggested releasing 50 percent of the pending DA. It however, reconsidered and directed the state to release 25 percent of such dues after senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, appearing for the state, submitted the government did not have the capacity to disburse such a large amount at once.
The Supreme Court passed the interim order while hearing the West Bengal government's appeal against a May 2022 Calcutta high court judgment.
Also Read:How did the collegium system change Supreme Court appointments? | Number Theory
The high court had directed the state to clear long pending DA arrears and align payments with central government rates. The state challenged this order in the Supreme Court in November 2022, arguing that it lacked the financial capacity to fully comply. While the government has since announced incremental DA hikes, the increases have fallen short of central rates, with a 37 percent gap still remaining.
A detailed order from the court is awaited.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Indian Express
2 hours ago
- Indian Express
Express View on Karnataka's draft bill on fake news: Don't make it law
Several elements go into making legislation 'bad in law': Vague provisions and definitions that invite misuse; arrogation of power to government authorities without necessary checks and guardrails; difficulties of enforcement or possibilities of selective enforcement and, most importantly, legitimate concerns about infringement on fundamental rights and violation of due process. The Karnataka Mis-Information and Fake News (Prohibition) Bill fulfils these criteria, and more. It constitutes an 'Authority' — headed by the state Information & Broadcasting Minister and made up mostly of lawmakers and officials selected by the government — that is all but certain to act as a censor. It is a bill of bad faith — it enables an exercise of arbitrary power under the garb of rooting out falsehood. It is an overzealous government addressing a complex issue through the bluntest of instruments. India has approximately 700 million smartphone users, and Karnataka is among the states with the highest internet penetration. Can the proposed Authority mine and analyse the vast amounts of data on social media while ensuring that no citizen's right to free speech is violated? More importantly, even if it could, should it? 'Fake news' is defined by the Bill as false or inaccurate reporting, editing that distorts facts and purely fabricated content. Misinformation is 'knowingly' or 'recklessly' spreading falsehoods, with exceptions for religious sermons, satire, and 'artistic expression'. Evidently, the government of Karnataka, not satisfied with setting itself up as the arbiter of Truth, seeks to define Art as well. It also wishes to prosecute what it deems as going against 'feminism' and 'Sanatan Dharma'. The Bill compounds the sin of loosely worded and vague provisions with harsh punishment: Offenders face fines up to Rs 10 lakh, seven years' imprisonment or both. It flies in the face of the letter and spirit of the Supreme Court's judgment in the Shreya Singhal (2013) case and the Bombay High Court verdict on the Centre's IT Rules in 2024, both of which warned against the dangers of ill-defined legal provisions encroaching on free speech. India already has laws on defamation and for protecting 'hurt sentiments', which are often weaponised by governments to curb fundamental freedoms. Karnataka's capital is a hub of innovation, and of a start-up culture that has the potential to propel the state's and the country's economy forward. The government must recognise that innovation and censorship do not go together. Fifty years after the Emergency, the lesson on the dangers of state excess and overreach should have been internalised by Congress governments, including in Karnataka. As Justice Gautam Patel noted in the Bombay HC's 2024 verdict, 'Every attempt to whittle down a fundamental right must be resisted root and branch.' Misinformation and fake news are indeed problems of the present and future. Addressing them requires digital literacy, which involves going to schools to ensure that the next generation is equipped to sift fact from falsehood. Such programmes require finesse, time and the right intent. Not a draconian law — the Bill needs to be binned.
Hindustan Times
2 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Mohali court extends Majithia's VB custody by 4 days in DA case
The Mohali district court on Wednesday extended the vigilance remand of Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader and former Punjab minister Bikram Singh Majithia by four days in a disproportionate assets (DA) case, allegedly involving the laundering of ₹ 540 crore of 'drug money'. Majithia,50, was produced in the court amid tight security after his seven-day vigilance remand ended on Wednesday. (HT File) Majithia,50, was produced in the court amid tight security after his seven-day vigilance remand ended on Wednesday. During the hearing, which lasted close to four hours, the prosecution accused Majithia of not cooperating with the probe agency. The prosecution informed the court that further remand was necessary to investigate Majithia's alleged benami property spread across 400 hectares in Shimla adding that he was not cooperating with the investigation. The prosecution also submitted relevant documents pertaining to the Shimla property in court to support the remand request. Speaking to the media after the hearing, public prosecutors Ferry Sofat and Preet Inder Pal Singh said the remand was extended after the VB filed an application seeking additional custodial interrogation. Majithia was arrested on June 25 in the case allegedly involving the laundering of ₹ 540 crore of 'drug money'. A detailed seven-page FIR, registered in VB (flying squad) police station, Mohali, by AIG Swarandeep Singh is based on the SIT's investigation into the 2021 drug-trafficking case under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act registered against Majithia under the Congress government. The FIR outlines an extensive money trail linking shell companies, suspicious foreign transactions and unexplained asset accumulation. The action was taken on the basis of a 2018 report of the anti-drug Special Task Force. Majithia's defence team, led by advocates Arshdeep Singh Kaler and HS Dhanoa, opposed the plea, arguing that no new evidence had been presented. 'The prosecution merely repeated the same allegations already addressed in earlier hearings,' Kaler said, adding, 'All these arguments have been placed before the Supreme Court (by the government). The investigating agency found nothing during raids conducted at Majithia's residences in Himachal Pradesh, Majitha, and Chandigarh.' Majithia was arrested by the Vigilance Bureau on June 25 from his residence in Amritsar's Green Avenue. He was initially remanded to seven days' custody on June 26. With that term ending on Wednesday, he was brought to the court under tight security at 10:15 am, and the court announced its decision at 2:45 pm following detailed arguments from both sides. The defence also objected to the vigilance bureau's latest request to take Majithia to Gorakhpur, stating that the Saraya Group of Industries, mentioned by the prosecution, had no active association with him. 'Majithia resigned from the company before entering politics. He holds only an 11% share and hasn't visited Gorakhpur in the past 16 years,' Kaler claimed. Kaler further alleged that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government was misusing its powers by placing Akali Dal leaders and supporters under house arrest. 'This case is politically motivated, and the government has gained nothing from it,' he added. Majithia has also approached the Punjab and Haryana high court, challenging the seven-day remand. The petition is scheduled to be heard on Thursday. Majithia spent more than five months in Patiala jail and walked out of prison in August 2022 after the Punjab and Haryana high court granted him bail.
Scroll.in
2 hours ago
- Scroll.in
Bihar voter roll revision: Why having to prove you are an Indian citizenship is a nightmare
The Election Commission of India's decision to ask for proof of citizenship from voters as part of a special intensive revision of the voter rolls in Bihar has once again shone a light on how difficult it is to prove citizenship in India. As part of the exercise, individuals whose names are not on the 2003 voter list will need to prove that they are Indian citizens. According to India's citizenship law, depending on the year in which one was born, this may require providing proof that one was born in India, as well as proof that one or both of one's parents were born in India as well. The citizenship proof requirement has been criticised by opposition parties in Bihar and the rest of India for its potential for voter exclusion. Bihar is part of a trend. Citizenship has been a major theme of the past decade in Indian politics. An exercise in 2019 to update the National Register of Citizens in Assam required residents to prove citizenship. In that same year, the Bharatiya Janata Party's manifesto included a promise to draw up a National Register of Citizens across the country. This is concerning since proving citizenship can be an onerous task in India. There is no one single single document that proves Indian citizen, for example. According to legal experts that Scroll spoke with, the Indian state's failure to provide easy and universal access to foundational documents creates a precarious system where citizenship can be questioned at any time, turning a fundamental right into a burden, especially for the country's most marginalised. What the law says Only foreign nationals who take up Indian citizenship are granted actual citizenship certificates. People actually born Indian do not have any such document. Thus, if asked to prove her citizenship, an Indian who is citizen by birth would have to produce a complex set of papers. For those born before 1987, proof of birth within India will be required. Those born after will need three sets of documents: proof of their birth in India, proof of their parent's citizenship and proof of their relationship with their parent. The commonly held idea that identity documents prove citizenship is not true in law. The Supreme Court and different High Courts have over the years held that documents such as Aadhaar card, voter identity card, permanent account card and a certificate issued by the Gram Panchayat Secretary, as well as ownership of a bank account or property are not evidence of citizenship. Red tape labyrinth This legal framework for proving citizenship would provide a challenge for most Indians. The biggest obstacle is that India has a massive documentation deficit. 'Prior to 1987, there aren't very good birth records maintained, especially in rural India,' said Rupali Samuel, an advocate at the Supreme Court who works on citizenship issues. 'Many births also happen at home. In a state like Bihar, you have a lot of remote village areas and adivasi communities where rural birth is not well documented.' Darshana Mitra, an assistant professor of law at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, pointed out that access to documents is often intertwined with class and privilege. 'The availability of documents becomes a function of literacy rate,' said Mitra, who is also co-founder and director of Parichay, a collaborative legal aid clinic that works on citizenship deprivation and statelessness in Assam. 'If you don't go to school and then don't go on to hold formal employment, you lose out on two levels of documents.' Naming maze Even when documents exist, they are often riddled with inconsistencies. 'In India, culturally, we don't name babies at birth,' Samuel noted. 'The name can be given after a ritual later on. So a lot of birth certificates are blank or they may not have the names of one or both parents.' This problem is compounded by the complexities of names in India. Latin spellings for Indian names are often not standardised, leading to wide variations. Furthermore, many Indian communities do keep surnames. 'Enumerators may unilaterally add suffixes like Kumar, Muhammad, Islam, Begum or Bai to give people two names,' Samuel said. This creates discrepancies across documents issued at different points in a person's life, which could be used to cast doubts on their citizenship. For those born after 1987, the challenge multiplies. 'Even a birth certificate is not enough because then you need to prove your parent's citizenship also,' said Samuel. 'The minute you start linking it to the status of your parents, a question mark can be raised on anyone's status along the line.' This creates a cascading burden of every-changing documentary proof that disproportionately harms the most vulnerable. 'We're generally not good with documents,' said Shahrukh Alam, an advocate at the Supreme Court. 'The state demands too many of them from people who don't have them, who can't get them made and who have no access to those kinds of resources.' Hurting Indians This has a real human cost explained Aashish Yadav, a PhD Candidate and research assistant at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School. 'People who suffer are those who are poor, who are marginalised, who have documents but may not have the time or a day off to get a document updated and meet new requirements,' he said. He added that this was widely documented during the National Register of Citizens-preparation exercise in Assam. Specific communities face unique hurdles. 'Migrant workers whose children are born in other parts of the country may not have access to those records or even speak the local language in which the documents are issued,' said Samuel. 'Transgender individuals, often ostracised by their families, may have documents with different names.' Mitra pointed out, based on her experience working in Assam, the predicament of women from marginalised communities whose births were not registered, who did not enter formal education and did not inherit any property from their paternal families. 'Such women have no connection with their parents in any documents,' she said. The absence of any guidelines on what qualifies as definitive proof of citizenship puts immense discretion in the hands of low level bureaucrats, said Yadav. 'There are no fixed goal posts,' he said. 'By design, the demands of the officials will change from region to region, community to community and person to person, without following due process and upholding fundamental rights of persons. This ambiguity creates fertile ground for profiling. 'Most likely, those who are Bengali Muslims will be looked at with suspicion,' warned Samuel. 'When you are looking at them with suspicion, then any issue they have with the documents becomes a reason to question their citizenship status.' Indeed, as Scroll has extensively reported, most of the alleged foreigners being pushed out in anti-immigrant drives in Assam and the rest of India are Bengali Muslims on suspicion of being Bangladeshis. Rethinking citizenship Given these deep-seated problems, is a single, definitive citizenship document the solution? Experts Scroll spoke with were sceptical. They argued that the problem isn't administrative, but political. Alam said that the experience with Aadhar and the yet-to-be-notified National Register of Citizens in Assam showed that the problem is not document-centric. 'It's about catching people out,' she said. 'You yourself create a particular documentary threshold and a few years later, if you think that's not enough of a net, you say, 'Well, this is not enough, I want something else'.' Yadav echoed this concern, pointing out that any such exercise, however well-intentioned, would inevitably lead to exclusion. 'Even the most benevolent rollout of a citizenship document now would still lead to people being found not eligible,' he said. 'This has been observed in many countries where such bureaucratic exercises have created statelessness.' There is no data in the public domain, as Alam pointed out, to suggest that non-citizens are voting in large numbers. The push for documentation appears to be driven by a political project of exclusion rather than an administrative need for clarity, she said. Experts suggested that instead of focusing on retrospective citizenship verification exercises, India needs to first invest in its social infrastructure. Mitra argued that the state, which has failed to provide universal access to documentation, cannot then penalise citizens for not possessing it. 'The state creates 'illegal immigrants' by refusing to recognise their citizenship,' she said. The solution, she suggested, lies in guaranteeing effective social services. 'If the state can guarantee social services from birth, like 100% birth registration and school enrolment, everyone will have the necessary documents.'
