Permanent commission, pensionary benefits for eligible women officers: Supreme Court

The three verdicts Tuesday are the culmination of protracted legal battles across multiple courts for the officers of each force. In the Air Force case, the women officers approached the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) and the Delhi High Court after being denied permanent commission and released in 2021 under a newly introduced 2019 policy, but both forums dismissed their pleas. In the Army case, after the top court’s Babita Puniya ruling opened the doors for women, the appellants were evaluated by regular selection boards but rejected on comparative merit; AFT dismissed their challenge in 2024, prompting their appeal to the top court.

The Navy officers’ legal journey was perhaps the most arduous. Following the court’s Annie Nagaraja ruling, they were rejected by a December 2020 selection board. Their subsequent challenge was remanded by the apex court in 2022 because the Navy had submitted evaluation criteria to the AFT in a “sealed cover”. When the AFT subsequently ordered yet another fresh selection board, the female officers approached the Supreme Court seeking finality.

Across all three cases, the primary similarity that emerged is the military’s reliance on Annual Confidential Reports (ACRs) — yearly performance evaluations — to determine an officer’s merit for PC. The Supreme Court noted that these ACRs were written years ago, during a time when government policy explicitly barred women from receiving a permanent commission. Because assessing officers knew these women would only serve a limited tenure, they graded them casually, reserving the highest marks for male officers whose long-term career progression depended on them.

The bench noted that “the cumulative consequence was a systemic pattern in which women officers… consistently received lower gradings, not due to lack of merit, but due to the absence of any perceived career horizon”. While the flawed ACRs were a common thread, the court also addressed specific arbitrary practices unique to each branch of the military.

Female Army officers argued they were systematically denied “criteria appointments” — roles involving higher command responsibilities — and career-enhancing courses, which negatively impacted their overall scores. In the case of the female Air Force officers, the dispute centred on a 2019 human resource policy that introduced new minimum performance criteria, including mandatory grades in in-service courses. The court noted that the Navy failed to disclose its evaluation criteria and vacancy calculations to the officers before the selection boards convened. This, it ruled, “violated basic norms of fairness and transparency.”