Rajagopalan

The respondent, plaintiff in S.C.S. No. 229 of 1955 on the file of the District Munsif's Court, Coimbatore, was an employee of the petitioner, the defendant in the suit. The plaintiff's services terminated on 24 October 1954. On 31 March 1955 the plaintiff sued the defendant for the recovery of a sum of Rs. 300. The details of that claim as given in the plaint were :

(1) salary from 1 August 1954 up to 1 October, 1954 at Rs. 75 per month - Rs. 150.

(2) Daily wages at Rs. 2-8-0 per day for Sundays from June 1954 to 8 September, 1954, 17 Sundays - Rs. 42-8-0.

(3) Leave salary earned by the plaintiff for his service under the defendant from June 1951 to September 1954 at Rs. 2-8-0 per day - Rs. 125.

(4) Fifteen days' salary in lieu of notice - Rs. 37-8-0.

From the total sum of Rs. 355 thus arrived at the plaintiff deducted Rs. 33. He gave up a sum of Rs. 22 and he limited his claim to Rs. 300. The plaintiff admitted that for a period 1 October 1954 to 24 October 1954, he had been paid his wages on a daily basis.

The defendant pleaded S.22 of the Payment of Wages Act (IV of 1936) in bar of the jurisdiction of the civil court to take cognizance of the plaintiff's claim. The defendant pleaded further that the claim for leave salary was barred by limitation. The defence to the claim for compensation in lieu of notice was that the defendant had voluntarily stayed a way from work on 24 October, 1954, and that he was not entitled to any compensation.

The learned District Munsif held that S.22 of the Payment of Wages Act was no bar to the maintainability of the suit. He negatived the claim of the plaintiff for leave salary and for compensation of fifteen days' salary in lieu of notice, and he decreed the claims (1) Rs. 135 constituting the arrears of salary, and (2) Rs. 42-8-0 the arrears of wages for Sundays on which the plaintiff worked.The defendant applied under S.25 of the Provincial Small Cause Courts Act to revise the judgment of the learned District Munsif. When the revision petition came on for hearing before Ramaswami Gounder, J., he sought a direction to post the case before a Division Bench for disposal :

In his order of reference Ramaswami Gounder, J., stated :

"The main question to be considered in this civil revision petition is whether the claim involved in the suit out of which the present revision petition arises falls within the jurisdiction of the special authority constituted under the Payment of Wages Act and whether the civil court has no jurisdiction to investigate into the claim. This question is one of considerable importance, and on this there has been no decision of this Court. There are however, bench decisions of other High Courts but unfortunately they are not uniform and some of them are conflicting." *

In our opinion, it is neither practicable nor desirable to attempt to evolve a formula which could be of universal application in deciding what falls within the scope of Ss.15 and 22 of the Payment of Wages Act (hereinafter referred to as the Act.) Our endeavour will be to examine whether the claim put forward in the suit, details of which we have furnished above, was one the cognizance of which by a civil court was barred by S.22 of the Act. The claim of the plaintiff in the suit, it should be remembered, was to recover a sum of Rs. 300 from the defendant. It was, if we may characterize it as such a composite claim. The component parts of the claim were :

(1) arrears of salary that had accrued to the plaintiff when he was in the service of the defendant but which were not paid;

(2) a claim for what was called leave salary for a period during which the plaintiff did not take any leave by contained to be on duty during which period he received his wages, and(3) compensation for wrongful termination of services without any notice.

That the learned District Munsif negatived the second and third heads of these claims cannot obviously affect the determination of the question, "Was the suit as framed m