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TMI Blog1976 (1) TMI 178X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... egal issue, substantial in its financial impact, is whether s. 25F read with s. 2(00), vis a vis a short employment, casts a lethal spell on the cessation of service for non-compliance with the condition precedent set out in the provision. The Certificate The certificate issued by the High Court under Art.133(1) is bad on its face, according to counsel for the respondent and the appeal consequently incompetent. We are inclined to agree that the grant of a constitutional passport to the Supreme Court by the High Court is not a matter of easy insouciance but anxious advertence to the dual vital requirements built into Art. 133(1) by specific amendment. Failure here stultifies the scheme of the Article and floods this Court with cases of lesser magnitude with illegitimate entry. A substantial question of law of general importance is a sine qua non to certify fitness for hearing by the apex court. Nay, . more; the question, however important and substantial, must be of such pervasive import and deep significance that in the High Court's judgment it imperatively needs to be settled at the national level by the highest bench. The crux of the matter has been correctly set out in a ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... he order of appointment, which bears in its bosom the 'good bye' to the employee after a few days, calls for construction in the light of s.2(oo) and s. 25F and we may as well read it here: (1) The appointment is purely a temporary one for a period of 9 days but may be terminated earlier, without assigning any reason therefor at the bank's discretion; (2) The employment, unless terminated earlier, will automatically cease at the expiry of the period i.e., 1972. This nine days' employment, tacked on to what has gone before, Fr has ripened to a continuous service for a year on the antecedent arithmetic of 240 days of broken bits of service. The legal issue The skiagram of the employment order must now be. studied to ascertain which of the rival meanings counsel have pressed deserves preference. Statutory construction, when courts consider welfare legislation with an economic justice bias, cannot turn on cold print glorified as grammatical construction but on teleological purpose and protective intendment. Here s. 25F, 25B and 2(oo) have a workers' mission and the input of Part IV of the Constitution also underscores this benignant approach. W ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... t of employment between the employer and the workman concerned contains a stipulation in that behalf; or (c) termination of the service of a workman on the ground of continued ill-health; for any reason whatsoever-very wide and almost admitting of no exception. Still, the employer urges that when the order of appointment carries an automatic cessation of service, tho period of employment works itself out by efflux of times, not by act of employer. Such cases are outside the concept of 'retrenchment' and cannot entail the burdensome conditions of s. 25F. Of course, that a nine-days' employment, hedged in with an express condition of temporariness and automatic cessation, may look like being in a different street (if we may use a colloquialism) from telling a man off by retrenching him. To retrench is to cut down. You cannot retrench without trenching or cutting. But dictionaries are not dictators of statutory construction where the benignant mood of a law and, more emphatically, the definition clause furnish a different denotation. Section 2(oo) is the master of the situation and the Court cannot truncate its amplitude. A break-down of s. 2(oo) unmista ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... me, or it may be said to be terminated when it is determined at notice or otherwise by some act of one of the parties. Here in my judgment the 7 word 'terminated' is used in this passage in para 190 in the transitive sense, and it postulates some act by somebody which is to bring the appointment to an end, and is not applicable to a case in which the appointment comes to end merely by effluxion of time. Words of multiple import have to be winnowed judicially to suit the c social philosophy of the statute. So screened we hold that the transitive and intransitive senses are covered in the current context. Moreover, an employer terminates employment not merely by passing an order as the service runs. He can do so by writing a composite order, one giving employment and the other ending or limiting it. A separate, subsequent determination is not the sole magnetic pull of the provision. A pre-emptive provision to terminate is struck by the same vice as the post-appointment termination. Dexterity of diction cannot defeat the articulated conscience of the provision. What follows? Had the State Bank known the law and acted on it, half-a-month's pay would have concluded t ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X
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