Lloyds Bank Ltd. vs The Lloyds Bank Indian Staff

Rewritten Version Notice: This is a rewritten version of the original judgment.

Court: supreme-court

Case Number: Not extracted

Decision Date: 17 April, 1953

Coram: B.K. Mukherjea, Ghulam Hasan, Patanjali Sastri

The Supreme Court of India heard the appeal titled Lloyds Bank Ltd. versus The Lloyds Bank Indian Staff, which was listed on the court’s docket on 17 April 1953. The bench comprised Chief Justice Patanjali Sastri, Justice B.K. Mukherjee, and Justice Ghulam Hasan. The matter before the Court was an appeal by special leave from an award rendered by the All-India Industrial Tribunal in the Bank Disputes sector. The respondents were permitted at the time special leave was granted to the appellants to raise any preliminary objection concerning the maintainability of the appeal, and they accordingly raised such an objection. The objection asserted that the award had been passed on 5 January 1950 and that, under Section 17 of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, the award had been published by the Government in a notification of the Ministry of Labour dated 17 January 1950. The same notification declared the award binding from that date for a period of one year. On the basis of this publication, it was contended that Article 136 of the Constitution could not be invoked because the Court had previously held that Article 136 possessed no retrospective effect. This contention was not denied by counsel for the respondent, who nevertheless argued that the award had in truth been published only on 28 January 1950, the date on which the relevant notification appeared in the Gazette of India. The Court examined the argument and found that it lacked persuasive force. Consequently, the Court allowed the preliminary objection, concluded that the appeal could not be maintained, and dismissed the appeal with costs awarded against the appellants.