PHC dismisses petition against executive allowance sanctioning

PESHAWAR: The Peshawar High Court (PHC) has dismissed a writ petition challenging sanctioning of executive allowance to grade 17 and above to Provincial Administrative Services (PAS), Provincial Civil Services (PCS) and Provincial Management Services (PMS) officers working against scheduled posts of establishment and administration departments with initial basic pay plus one and half month initial pay.

A two-member bench comprising Chief Justice Yahya Afridi and Justice Roohul Amin Khan dismissed the petition.

The bench observed that the petitioner had no locus standi and failed to point out any money of the exchequer, specifically allocated in the budget, for the health, education and other facilities of the general public to have been fixed and specified through the impugned notification for the “Executive allowance”.

In the judgment, authored by Justice Roohul Amin Khan, it was stated that the impugned notification had been notified by the government after due deliberation and approval in a legal manner.

A lawyer, Gul Rehman Mohmand, had filed the petition. He sought a court order to declare the notification on the executive allowances as void.The lawyer submitted that the BPS-17 and above of PAS, PCS and PMS officers were now getting a huge salary while in other sectors, including police, education, health and administration departments were drawing a meager salary. He said the officers were getting much more facilities from other departments mentioned above.

However, the court stated in the judgment that the petitioner had claimed that he was an aggrieved person and a tax payer but on the vetting the documents annexed with the petition, we could not find a single evidence to substantiate his stance with regard to payment of income tax.

“For the sake of arguments, if contention of the petitioner is admitted as true, even then a tax payer is not entitled to raise an objection to the policies of the government, particularly, in the matters of pay, and allowance of civil servants. It is settled law that for invoking the extra ordinary constitutional jurisdiction of this court under Article 199 of the Constitution, it is sine qua non for the petitioner to establish that he is an aggrieved person as he has suffered a legal grievance or against whom a decision has been pronounced which has wrongly deprived him of his legal rights or wrongly refused to him something to which he was legally entitled,” the court declared.

It was further observed that the last, but not the least, pay, allowance, incentives and rewards are the guaranteed constitutional rights of the civil servants, award of which cannot be done away with, by this court in its constitutional jurisdiction, unless the same are proved arbitrary or against the mandate of Constitution. The court declared that for the reasons discussed above the writ petition was meritless and hereby dismissed.