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Informist, Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2026

 

NEW DELHI – The Bombay High Court Wednesday declared arbitrary and unjust a Maharashtra government resolution on paying ex-gratia benefits only to those urban local body employees who, after contracting COVID-19, were admitted in government hospitals. Once it had been recorded that the employee had died of the disease, the nature of the hospital he or she had been admitted to did not matter, the court said. The requirement was a mere procedural formality, purely technical in nature, it said. What mattered was whether the employee had died after contracting the disease in the line of duty.

 

The court directed the Nashik district collector to forward within four weeks a proposal to pay COVID-19 compensation of INR 5 million to members of the family of Unmesh Kulkarni, who was posted as a force staff at the Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Playground and Railway Institute by the Manmad Municipal Council during the pandemic. It warned that any attempt thereafter to delay or defeat the claim on technical grounds would be viewed seriously.

 

Kulkarni died on Mar. 29, 2021, and the proposal for the ex-gratia had been pending ever since. To again subject the proposal to a detailed verification and scrutiny after such a long delay would amount to adding to the family's agony, the court said. It noted that Kulkarni had served for 31 years as a sweeper with the municipal council. Moreover, he was a frontline worker during the pandemic.

 

The state government argument was that the employee was admitted to a private hospital. The court said that to subject the ex-gratia proposal to scrutiny in terms of a resolution that was issued after the employee's death would be unjust, particularly when the cause of death was already on record and there was no dispute about whether the employee was a frontline worker during the pandemic.  End

 

Reported by Surya Tripathi

Edited by Rajeev Pai

 

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