Bank Management has the right to reject VRS offer-Supreme Court-The Hindu

“The object of scheme was not to reward good officers or to punish bad ones”

The management of a nationalised bank has the discretion either to accept or reject an employee's request for voluntary retirement under the Voluntary Retirement Scheme (VRS) and he cannot claim a mandatory right that his request should be accepted, the Supreme Court has held.

A Bench of Justices Aftab Alam and R.M. Lodha said: “The object of the Scheme was not to reward the good officers or to punish the bad ones. Even though depending upon personal circumstances, VRS might have appeared to some individual officers as personally beneficial, it was not envisaged by the bank as a means to give personal rewards or to punish individual employees by granting or refusing to grant VRS to them.”

The Bench set aside an Allahabad High Court judgment quashing the decision of the Indian Overseas Bank not to accept the VRS request of respondent-officer Tribhuwan Nath Srivastava holding that the bank had no absolute discretion to reject the request under the IOB Officers/Employees Voluntary Retirement Scheme – 2000, which remained in operation for five weeks from December 15, 2000 to January 19, 2001.

Bank Management has the right to reject VRS offer-Supreme Court