The Kerala High Court has upheld the order allowing disability pension to an ex-sepoy in the Indian Army. The pension will be received by Valsala S., who carried on the legal battle on behalf of her late husband Sreekantan Nair.

Mr. Nair was recruited to the Indian Army in 1973, and “invalidated out of service” in 1979 due to schizophrenia. He had applied for disability pension, but was denied then. All his subsequent appeals too were dismissed. Mr. Nair passed away in 1994, and was survived by his wife and two children.

Tribunal’s order

Ms. Valsala filed a petition before the Armed Forces Tribunal’s Kochi regional bench in 2018, for the sanction of the disability and family pensions with interest on arrears. The tribunal ordered the defence officials to include the names of Ms. Valsala and their children on record as Mr. Nair’s family and to grant the disability pension at 60% with interest on arrears, for two years from the date of his discharge.

The Union government contended in the High Court that the disability was “neither attributable to nor aggravated by military service” and that the tribunal did not have the authority to make its own conclusions over the medical board’s report. Ms. Valsala argued that the “medical board had not given any reason for the conclusion that the disability was constitutional in origin”.

The High Court, maintaining the tribunal’s order, said social security legislation must be considered liberally and given a beneficial interpretation with the widest possible meaning which the language permits. If there is a word in the statute that has two meanings, the word which provides more benefit must be adopted, it said.

The court reasoned that since Mr. Nair did not opt out of service but was invalidated after obtaining the medical board’s opinion, the burden of proving the grounds for denying disability lies on the authority. The governing rules provide that a disease which has led to a person’s discharge or death is assumed to have occurred in service, unless it is a disease that cannot be detected on the medical examination before acceptance for service.