In a major win for a retired army nurse, the Delhi High Court has ordered the central government to pay disability pension to Dropadi Tripathi, who dedicated over 36 years to military service.
Tripathi joined the Indian Army in 1969 and retired in 2006 after battling health issues like obesity and hypertension. Medical experts from the Release Medical Board rated her obesity disability at just 1-5 percent but pegged hypertension at 30 percent. She applied for the pension, arguing these conditions forced her early exit from service. But authorities turned her down, and the Armed Forces Tribunal backed that decision in April 2023.
Now, a Delhi High Court bench—Justices C. Hari Shankar and Om Prakash Shukla—has overturned the tribunal’s ruling. They slammed the tribunal for wrongly assuming Tripathi’s hypertension stemmed only from her obesity, without any solid medical proof. “The tribunal wasn’t right to make that link on its own,” the judges noted, pointing out that no medical board or specialist had confirmed such a connection.
The court stressed a key rule: It’s up to the government, not the veteran, to prove if a disability links back to service duties. They added a straightforward point—”Not every overweight person gets hypertension, and not everyone with high blood pressure is obese”—dismissing claims that Tripathi’s condition was her fault for not losing weight.
As a result, the bench directed authorities to release Tripathi’s full disability pension, starting from her 2006 retirement date, complete with back payments. They gave officials 12 weeks to sort it out, or face 9 percent annual interest on the delay. On top of that, the court applied a Supreme Court precedent from the Ram Avtar case, bumping her disability rating up to 50 percent for pension purposes—effective from that earlier ruling.
This decision highlights ongoing fights by army veterans for fair disability pensions in India, especially when health issues from long service get tangled in red tape.
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