JUDGMENT

ORDER :— This is just to call amen to a heroic struggle waged by the petitioner in the fall of his life for recovering his hard-earned dues from heartless, unsympathetic and occasionally hostile bureaucracy. In an unequal fight between the mightly State and a retiree, judicial process at the apex Court had to interpose itself more than once to the balance heavily titled against the petitioner. The outcome is reassuring in that the wrong has been righted and a festering wound has healed but the frightening legacy of the whole episode is so disturbing that one shudders at the thought as to how after rendering long, meritorious and devoted service for 38 years the employee was thrown on the thorns of life and left to bleed.

2. A Constitution Bench of this Court in D. S. Nakara v. Union of India (1983) 2 SCR 165 posed three questions: What is a pension?, What are the goals of pension? and what public interest or purpose, if any, it seeks to serve?, and proceeded to answer the same inter alia that pension is not only a compensation for service rendered in the past but it has a broader significance in that it is a measure of socio-economic justice which inheres economic securit