He stayed away from his own departmental enquiry, and fifteen years later his heirs lose the case
A bank employee dismissed without notice in 2011 challenged the enquiry that produced it. The Patna High Court explains the narrow room a writ court has to disturb either the findings or the penalty.
On 22 September 2026 Justice Ritesh Kumar dismissed a writ petition filed in 2011 by an employee of the Central Bank of India — by then deceased, the matter being pursued by his legal representatives — against his dismissal from service.
Dismissal without notice is the heaviest penalty a bank's service rules provide, and the accompanying direction on the subsistence allowance meant the employee also lost money he had already received during suspension.
What was challenged
The petition sought certiorari to set aside an administrative order of February 2011 issued by the Assistant Regional Manager at Siwan, by which the punishment of dismissal without notice was imposed, together with a direction that he would not receive the difference between salary and the subsistence allowance already paid during his suspension.
It also challenged the appellate order of June 2011.
The enquiry he did not attend
The procedural history recorded in the judgment is unusually complete, and it is what decides the case.
A second show cause notice was issued in September 2010 under the signature of the disciplinary authority, and the enquiry report of August 2010 was forwarded with it. The employee replied in October 2010, again asking to be supplied documents which had been directed to be given to him by a letter of May 2010. The enquiry officer responded in November 2010, informing him that all relevant documents had been provided to him during the course of the departmental enquiry.
The finding that mattered most, however, is that the delinquent did not participate in the proceeding. The charges were nonetheless found proved by the enquiry officer on the statements of witnesses and the documents relied on by the management.
The request for documents is the kind of complaint that can be fatal to an enquiry, because a delinquent who is refused the material relied on against him cannot meet it. Here it did not carry, the enquiry officer having recorded that everything relevant had been supplied during the enquiry itself — a statement the petitioner, not having attended, was poorly placed to contradict.
When a writ court may interfere with findings
The Court applied the settled standard, drawing on a coordinate Bench decision in a case against another bank.
Where the material — management exhibits and the oral evidence of management witnesses — indicates reasonableness on the part of the enquiry officer in arriving at the findings recorded in the report, those findings cannot be called perverse. A writ court does not sit in appeal on the appreciation of evidence in a domestic enquiry; it asks whether there was material on which a reasonable person could have reached the conclusion, and whether the procedure was fair.
On that test the findings survived.
What a writ court will not do is re-try the charge. It has neither the witnesses nor the record of their demeanour, and the domestic enquiry is the forum the service rules provide for that purpose.
And with the penalty
The remaining argument was that dismissal was disproportionate to the charges. The Court sets out the rule in terms.
A High Court or Tribunal exercising judicial review cannot normally substitute its own conclusion on penalty and impose a different one. Where the punishment imposed by the disciplinary or appellate authority shocks the conscience of the court, it may properly mould the relief — directing the authority to reconsider the penalty, or, to shorten the litigation, in an exceptional and rare case imposing an appropriate punishment itself, with cogent reasons.
That threshold — shocking the conscience — is deliberately high. It is not enough that the court would have imposed something lighter.
Here the Court found the threshold not met. The delinquent had not participated in the proceeding; the charges were proved by the enquiry officer on the evidence of witnesses and the management’s documents; and the material on record showed the withdrawals at the heart of the charge.
There is one further feature worth noting. The employee died while the petition was pending, and it was continued by his legal representatives. What was at stake by the end was therefore not reinstatement but the terminal benefits and the withheld difference between salary and subsistence allowance.
The Court examined the material itself before reaching that conclusion rather than deferring automatically, and found on the record that the withdrawals forming the subject of the charge had been made.
Fifteen years elapsed between the petition and its decision, during which the petitioner died. Whatever the merits, a challenge to a dismissal that takes that long ceases to be about the job.
The result
The Court found no reason to interfere with either the dismissal order of February 2011 or the appellate order of June 2011. The writ petition was dismissed and pending applications disposed of.
The cost of non-participation is the lesson. An employee who declines to attend a departmental enquiry leaves the record entirely in the employer’s hands — and it is that record a writ court reads fifteen years later, with nothing on the other side of it.