SOMVATIBAI JHARIYA Vs. STATE OF M.P.

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE cardinal issue that emanates in this writ petition is whether regardless of colossal procrastination and mammoth lull, the petitioner, a hapless and unfortunate widow, should be extended the benefit of compassionate appointment or her rights are to be treated to have been clogged and fettered with efflux of time making it totally impermissible to rise like phoenix.

(2.) MR . Arvind Nair, Learned Counsel for the petitioner initiated a battle between the sympathy and law by advancing a vehement contention that though the husband of the petitioner breathed his last in the first year of the 8th decade of the last century i.e. 1971 yet her case for grant of compassionate appointment despite being recommended by the Collector, Jabalpur and the Commissioner, Land Records, Gwalior, (as it did deserve sympathy) was not looked into and paid heed to by the higher authorities because of their sphinx like propensity that eventually the petitioner was compelled to submit a fresh representation in the year 1996 which faced dismissal by virtue of an order passed by an incompetent authority in the year 1999 and ultimately in 2004 by the authority who is competent to consider, and ergo she is entitled to be extended the benefit of compassionate appointment to survive and sustain herself and saved from being driven to the streets in an agonized and distressed state. 2A. The petitioner can definitely harbour immense hope but the same has to be nurtured within time and there is time for grappling with the every fact situation. Thirty -three years is a good major of time in the speck of time -frame. The Learned Counsel for the petitioner has endeavoured hard to put the blame on the authorities who did not react correctly and soundly till 2004. The Learned Counsel has laboured hard to impress upon this Court that the concept of compassion cannot be ostracized from the realm of mercy. It is submitted by him that the pity and mercy deserve to be extended in the case of this nature inasmuch as relaxing of scrutiny has to have a free play in the joints in the case at hand as justice has to be tempered with mercy. In this context, I may refer with profit to the famous lines from the Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare :