The main legal point established was that the Employees' Provident Funds Act could apply to an establishment under S.15 of the Working Journalists Act, irrespective of the timing of the establishment and the Act's amendments.

1. In these appeals the parties are the same and the question involved is also the same. They may therefore be disposed of by a common judgment.

2. We shall now state the facts of the first case. The Provident Fund Inspector, Quilon filed a complaint against the Kerala Janatha Printers and Publishers (P) Ltd., Trivandrum and K. Krishna Pillai, the Managing Director of the above company, alleging that they did not pay the contribution and administrative charges for the months of June, July and August, 1960 under the Employees' Provident Funds Scheme of 1952 and that they were therefore liable for punishment. The said establishment was started on 25th January 1957; and the establishment started employing more than twenty but less than fifty persons a day from May 1960. It is also not disputed that the establishment was brought under the Employees' Provident Funds Act and Scheme framed thereunder from 31st May 1960.

3. The Employees' Provident Funds Act was passed in 1952; and it was amended several times, ultimately by Act 46 of 1960 in December 1960. The accused contended that it was the amended Act that applied to this establishment; and that under the said Act its provisions would not apply to an establishment like this before five years from the date of its establishment, so that, until 1962 January the Act and the Scheme could not be applied to this establishment. This plea was accepted by the lower court and the accused were acquitted. The Provident Fund Inspector has come up in appeal.

4. The lower court is in error in accepting this reasoning; still, its conclusion is partly correct. Under the original Provident Funds Act of 1952 a factory employing fifty or more persons alone could be brought within the scope of the Act. This was amended in December 1960 by Act 46 of 1960, under which the word 'twenty' was substituted for the word 'fifty' in sub-section (3) of S.1, with the result that the Provident Funds Act could thereafter be applied to establishments employing twenty or more persons a day. In the establishment before us, the number of workers is admittedly less than fifty but more than twenty. Therefore, even if the three years' period contemplated by the Act of 1952 was over before June 1960, since the number of workmen required under that Act was fifty, the Kerala Janatha Printers and Publishers could not have come within the scope of the Act as it stood in June, July or August, 1960. On the other hand, if it was the Act as amended in 1960 that was applied, then also the Kerala Janatha Printers and Publishers could not have been brought under the Act in 1960, since the five years period under the amended Act had not then expired. Thus the Employees' Provident Funds Act could not have been directly applied to this establishment; and to that extent the decision of the lower court is correct, though not for the reason given by the lower court.

5. But there is another important aspect to the question. By S.15 of the Working Journalists (Conditions of Service) and Miscellaneous Provisions Act of 1955, the Provident Funds Act of 1952, as in force for the time being, was made applicable to every newspaper establishment in which twenty or more persons were employed on any day, as if such establishment were a factory to which the Provident Funds Act had been applied by notification of the Central Government under sub-section (3) of S.1 thereof, and as if a newspaper employee were an employee within the meaning of that Act. In consequence, the Central Government issued S.R.O.2981 in the Gazette of India Extraordinary on 7th December 1956, by which Chapter X containing special provisions applicable to newspaper establishments was added to the Provident Funds Scheme. Evidently, under this provision, the Provident Funds Act and the Scheme must apply to the Kerala Janatha Printers and Publishers, in case the establishment is a newspaper establishment.

6. Mr. Kalathil Velayudhan Nair, the counsel of the respondents, dispu