A higher office in the chain of command brings a heavier duty of trust, and misconduct by those at the top can justifiably attract stiffer punishment than the same wrongdoing by subordinates, the Supreme Court has ruled while restoring the dismissal of a Punjab & Sind Bank senior manager accused of helping siphon off customers’ money. The judgment, delivered on April 2 by Justices Dipankar Datta and Satish Chandra Sharma in Punjab & Sind Bank v. Sh. Raj Kumar, set aside Delhi High Court orders that had reduced the manager’s penalty from dismissal to compulsory retirement. The court said the principle of equal treatment in disciplinary cases does not mean that employees at sharply different levels of responsibility must always receive the same punishment. In language likely to be cited in future service matters, the bench held that “authority carries accountability” and that a higher-ranking official, entrusted not only with personal compliance but also oversight of subordinates, can be judged more severely when involved in financial misconduct. The judges found that the High Court had erred by granting the manager parity with lower-ranking co-delinquents merely because all three were linked to the same episode.
The case arose from disciplinary proceedings within Punjab & Sind Bank against Raj Kumar, who had joined the lender as a clerk-cashier in 1987 and later rose to the post of Senior Manager in MMGS-III scale. According to the record before the court, he was suspended in December 2011 and was later proceeded against departmentally over allegations that he connived with a bank officer and a gunman to misappropriate customers’ funds for personal gain and remove bank records. A Delhi High Court record cited in later reporting shows the dismissal order was passed on November 25, 2014, which fits the chronology of the litigation that followed.
The disciplinary authority imposed different penalties on the three employees. The senior manager was dismissed from service. One co-delinquent, identified in the judgment as Gurjant Singh, received compulsory retirement, while the other, Sukhdev Singh, was punished by “lowering by two stages”, which the Supreme Court read as a reduction in pay. The respondent challenged the disparity, arguing that the charges arose from the same transactions and that punishing him more harshly offended Article 14 of the Constitution. A single judge of the Delhi High Court accepted that argument and converted the dismissal into compulsory retirement, and a division bench later upheld that view before the bank carried the matter to the Supreme Court.
Reversing those findings, the Supreme Court said the comparison itself was flawed. It noted that the manager’s rank was “not merely titular” but carried a higher degree of integrity, responsibility and supervisory obligation. Because the co-delinquents had narrower powers and authority, the court said, they could not be equated with him for the purpose of deciding punishment. The bench went further, observing that equating a branch manager with a gunman was “in outrageous defiance of logic and reason”, underscoring the gulf in status, duty and institutional trust between the posts.
The ruling also reiterates a wider judicial principle on disciplinary matters: courts exercising judicial review should be slow to tamper with punishments imposed by employers unless the penalty is irrational, perverse or so disproportionate that it shocks the conscience of the court. The judges surveyed earlier Supreme Court precedents and said that, ordinarily, the disciplinary authority is best placed to judge what is required to preserve order and integrity in the workforce. On the facts of this case, they held that dismissal of the senior manager was neither shocking nor disproportionate.