- (1.) THE Regional Provident Fund Commissioner, Punjab sent a notice to the petitioner-company, Metro Motors Private Limited, demanding contribution to the employees' provident Fund Scheme, and the petitioner thereupon obtained a rule from this Court for the quashing of that notice and for prohibiting be Regional provident Fund Commissioner from recovering the amount, the ground taken being that the petitioner-company was not running any factory covered by the provisions of the Employees' Provident Funds Act, 1952.
(2.) THE relevant facts are these : The Metro Motors Private Limited have a shop for the sale of motor-cars and attached to that shop is a service-station where motorcars are serviced as well as repaired. About half a mile from these premises is a workshop owned by this company and in that workshop bodies for trucks and buses are made by carpenters and other persons employed by the company. The petitioners case is that neither their shop, where cars are sold, nor the attached service-station, where cars are serviced and repaired, nor the other premises, where bodies for trucks and buses are made, IS really a factory as no manufacturing process is carried on at any of these places and further that, in any case, at none of these places is the number of persons employed fifty or more than fifty.
(3.) IT is admitted before us that before the Employees' Provident Funds Act, 1952, can apply, it has to be shown that there is in existence a factory engaged in an industry specified in Schedule I to the Act in which factory fifty or more persons are employed. The solo question, therefore, is whether any such factory is in existence in the present case, and this depends on the interpretation of the provisions of the Act already referred to.;