‘Unequal playing field’: Supreme Court flags ‘systemic’ issues in armed forces’ evaluation of women officers, orders full pension

In the case of the Air Force SSCWOs, the bench said that their ACRs, “having never been authored to assess their suitability for career progression, could not have been considered as indicative thereof, and utilised to deny them the grant of PC later on”.

It added, “In such circumstances, we have no option but to conclude that the ACRs of the Appellants were authored in an environment where their suitability for PC was never meaningfully contemplated. The subsequent use of such reports, which are not truly indicative of their suitability for long-term career progression, to determine their eligibility for PC is thus inherently unfair and arbitrary. In effect, such use has materially prejudiced their consideration for the grant of PC.”

The court also held that though a Minimum Performance Criteria was introduced for the first time in 2019, it “was implemented in haste without affording the” SSCWOs “a reasonable opportunity to meet such criteria prior to the conduct of the first Board in 2019”.

“This accelerated timeline effectively deprived many of them of any meaningful opportunity to comply with the newly-introduced requirements, particularly the acquisition of Categorisation. As a result, a significant number of SSCWOs were rendered ineligible at the threshold without any realistic chance to remedy the deficiency,” it held.

An entrenched idea of limited career progression

About the Army SSCWOs who had approached it, the court said their ACRs, too, “were graded during the period when women, as a whole, were considered ineligible for PC as a matter of policy”.

“Owing to this entrenched idea that there was limited career progression for women officers, the ACRs were graded casually, with the assumption that they would have little to no bearing on long-term career prospects. In turn, this led to routine, middling gradings for SSCWOs, while higher grades were disproportionately concentrated amongst the male officers, who were in the running for PC,” the court held.

The court noted that ACRs used to evaluate these women were written before the landmark Babita Puniya ruling on February 17, 2020. At that time, women in most branches were officially barred from PC and limited to just 14 years of service. Because supervisors knew these women had no long-term future in the military, their evaluations did not account for leadership potential or career growth, opportunities that were strictly reserved for their male colleagues, it said.

The court said, “In such a context, the practice of assigning lower or average grades to women officers seems to have become normalised, as there was no real consequence or benefit to receiving higher grades, and that having never been evaluated for suitability for long-term career progression, since none existed, their ACRs could not realistically reflect such potential or be held to be indicative of such capacity.”

The court observed that the systemic lower grading given to women officers outside the Judge Advocate General (JAG) and Army Educational Corps (AEC) cadres was not a reflection of their lack of merit but rather due to the absence of any perceived career horizon.

It said, “This phenomenon has come back to haunt those very SSCWOs as they were subsequently and quite abruptly placed in a competition for PC with their male counterparts, who did not undergo such hindrances in grading over the course of their decade-long service. It is, therefore, not surprising to us that the differential treatment meted out to officers ‘with a future’ in the Army and those deemed to be without one has resulted in an unequal playing field.”

Supreme Court cites ‘deemed unsuitability’

On the plea of Navy SSCWOs, the court said they were inducted at a time when women officers were not eligible for consideration for the grant of PC in their respective branches/cadres.

The court outlined the evolution of women’s service terms, noting that before 2002, SSCOs served only seven years, with a possible extension to ten. A 2002 policy updated this to a ten-year base tenure with a maximum of 14 years. However, until 2008, women in most non-technical roles were still blocked from PC due to their original hiring terms.

The court observed that although women were first recruited into the Navy in 1991 with a promise of a permanent career policy by 1997, that promise went unfulfilled for nearly two decades. Even after a shift in 2008, PC was limited to just three branches—Law, Education, and Naval Architecture—and applied only to recruits joining after January 2009.

The court said that since they also “were graded in an environment where their suitability for PC was never meaningfully evaluated, the assessment of inter se merit is held to have been materially distorted”.

It added, “We, therefore, conclude that this circularity, where past ineligibility was belatedly transformed into ‘deemed unsuitability’ for career progression, has resulted in an uneven playing field.”