By Admin 
West Bengal government has received a big blow from the Supreme Court. The court has directed that the state government should release the outstanding Dearness Allowance (DA) to its employees from the year 2009 to 2019. The court has said that this amount should be delivered to the employees by March. The court has declared this as the statutory right of the employees.
According to the report of Live Law, Justice Sanjay Karol and Justice Prashant Kumar Mishra said that once the dearness allowance is calculated under the All India Consumer Price Index (AICPI) as per the statutory rules, the state government cannot change its calculation through a memorandum.
The Supreme Court has formed a special committee under the chairmanship of former Justice Indu Malhotra to determine the process of payment. The committee will include two retired Chief Justices of the High Court and senior officers of CAG. The court has given this decision on the appeal of the state government. The state government had filed a petition against previous legal defeats in which the verdict was given in favor of the employees.
The Supreme Court has partially upheld the decision of the Calcutta High Court, in which the Bengal Government was directed to pay dearness allowance by calculating it under the AICPI present in the Revision of Pay and Allowances Rules (ROPA). The court said that DA is mandatory for calculating emoluments under ROPA rules. The court also rejected the arguments of the state government in which the allowance was denied on the basis of financial capacity.
This dispute is related to the delay in the dearness allowance of the state government employees under the ROPA Rules, 2009 of Bengal, made after the Fifth Pay Commission in the year 2008. In 2016, several employee unions had filed a complaint in the West Bengal Administrative Tribunal that despite linking ROPA to AICPI, dearness allowance had not been paid for a long time.