If sources are to be believed, the state government can now announce the payment of arrears while avoiding court cases or the state government can challenge the order of the Calcutta High Court on the payment of DA arrears in the Supreme Court.
There is good news for the government employees of West Bengal. A new update has come out on dearness allowance arrears. According to media reports, the Mamata government of West Bengal can take a decision on the arrears of Dearness Allowance (DA) of employees in November. The state government can make an announcement in this regard before November 4. Let us inform that in the past months, the Calcutta High Court had ordered the state government to pay the outstanding DA within 3 months.
The special thing is that on November 4, State Chief Secretary H.K. Dwivedi and Finance Secretary Manoj Pant have been asked to file affidavits in the Calcutta High Court, explaining why there was no contempt of court proceedings against the state government for not honoring its decision to pay DA dues by August 19. The Confederation of State Government Employees says that if the state government wants, they are ready to fight the matter up to the Supreme Court.
If sources are to be believed, the state government can now announce the payment of arrears while avoiding court cases or the state government can challenge the order of the Calcutta High Court on the payment of DA arrears in the Supreme Court. There has been no official statement or confirmation from the side about going to the Supreme Court, so the employees are expected to announce some arrears before November 4.
In fact, in the past months, the Calcutta High Court had refused to reconsider the DA payment decision. Justice Harish Tandon and Justice Rabindranath Samant had dismissed the state government’s plea to reconsider the May 20 order. The same High Court ordered the Mamata Banerjee government to pay the arrears of dearness allowance within 3 months Though the state government filed a review petition in the same bench along with a petition to review the judgment, the division bench dismissed the review petition and upheld its earlier order in the matter on May 22.
What is the matter
Significantly, while upholding an order of the State Administrative Tribunal (SAT), the Calcutta High Court had in May directed the West Bengal government to pay the outstanding dearness allowance from July 2009 within three months. The state government had filed a writ petition in the high court challenging the July 2019 order of the SAT. In this order, the SAT had asked the state government to give DA as per the directions of the Center and pay the outstanding amount in three installments. In this case the original petitioner has filed a contempt of court petition in the Calcutta High Court against the State Government. The next hearing on the contempt of court petition will be on November 9. He had alleged that the authorities have not paid the DA within three months from May 2022.
