LAW FOR ALL

The Persons with disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights and Full Participation) Act, 1995 Mental disorders - benefits under disability act = whether at the time of discharge from service he was suffering from a disease which made him unfit to continue in service and whether he would be entitled to disability pension.=Although, the Courts are extremely loath to interfere with the opinion of the experts, there is nothing like exclusion of judicial review of the decision taken on the basis of such opinion. What needs to be emphasized is that the opinion of the experts deserves respect and not worship and the Courts and other judicial / quasi-judicial forums entrusted with the task of deciding the disputes relating to premature release / discharge from the Army cannot, in each and every case, refuse to examine the record of the Medical Board for determining whether or not the conclusion reached by it is legally sustainable.= “You have been diagnosed as a case of SCHIZOPHRENIC REACTION and not LUNATIC. As such your request to produce you before a medical board to examine you whether you are Lunatic or free from LUNACY does not arise. Therefore no resurvey medical board can be held in your case.”= His case was considered on 14.11.1977 by the Invaliding Medical Board held at Military Hospital, Meerut and on its recommendations, he was discharged from service. His claim for disability pension was rejected by Principal Controller of Defence Accounts (Pension), Allahabad on the ground that the disease, i.e., Schizophrenic Reaction, which was the cause of his discharge was not attributable to the military service.= Unfortunately, the Tribunal did not even bother to look into the contents of the certificate issued by the Invalidating Medical Board and mechanically observed that it cannot sit in appeal over the opinion of the Medical Board. If the learned members of the Tribunal had taken pains to study the standard medical dictionaries and medical literature like “The Theory and Practice of Psychiatry” by F.C. Redlich and Daniel X. Freedman, and Modi’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology, then they would have definitely found that the observation made by Dr. Lalitha Rao was substantially incompatible with the existing literature on the subject and the conclusion recorded by the Invaliding Medical Board that it was a case of Schizophrenic Reaction was not well founded and required a review in the context of the observation made by Dr. Lalitha Rao herself that with the treatment the appellant had improved. In our considered view, having regard to the peculiar facts of this case, the Tribunal should have ordered constitution of Review Medical Board for re-examination of the appellant. 18. In Controller of Defence Accounts (Pension) v. S. Balachandran Nair (2005) 13 SCC 128 on which reliance has been placed by the Tribunal, this Court referred to Regulations 173 and 423 of the Pension Regulations and held that the definite opinion formed by the Medical Board that the disease suffered by the respondent was constitutional and was not attributable to Military Service was binding and the High Court was not justified in directing payment of disability pension to the respondent. The same view was reiterated in Ministry of Defence v. A.V. Damodaran (2009) 9 SCC 140. However, in neither of those cases, this Court was called upon to consider a situation where the Medical Board had entirely relied upon an inchoate opinion expressed by the Psychiatrist and no effort was made to consider the improvement made in the degree of illness after the treatment. 19. As a corollary to the above discussion, we hold that the impugned order as also orders dated 14.7.2011 and 16.9.2011 passed by the Tribunal are legally unsustainable. In the result, the appeal is allowed. The orders passed by the Tribunal are set aside and the respondents are directed to refer the case to Review Medical Board for reassessing the medical condition of the appellant and find out whether at the time of discharge from service he was suffering from a disease which made him unfit to continue in service and whether he would be entitled to disability pension.