Punjab DA appeal delay: Story of a Missed Deadline — How Punjab Almost Failed to File Its Own DA Appeal
Punjab DA appeal delay: Punjab’s Finance Department took 24 days to decide whether to challenge the HC’s DA order — and then filed six days late. The delay is now on sworn affidavit before a Division Bench.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, May 24
When the Punjab and Haryana High Court ruled on April 8 that the state government must pay full Dearness Allowance to its employees and pensioners by June 30, the clock started ticking — not just for compliance, but for any appeal. The government had 30 days to challenge the judgment. It took 24 days just to decide it wanted to.
By the time the Finance Department was ready to file, it had already missed the deadline by six days.
The admission is not from a critic or an opposition party. It is on sworn affidavit, filed before the Punjab and Haryana High Court by Hema Rani, Under Secretary, Finance Department, Government of Punjab, Main Civil Secretariat — the official the state government chose to represent it in its leave patent appeal (LPA), its formal challenge to the April 8 DA judgment.
The affidavit is part of its application filed alongside the main Letters Patent Appeal, praying for condonation of the six-day delay in filing.
The timeline on affidavit
Punjab DA appeal delay: The sequence of events that Hema Rani has placed on record is worth reading carefully.
The High Court’s April 8 judgment was uploaded on the court’s portal on April 19, 2026. From that point, according to the affidavit, the file was moved to “higher authorities” within the Finance Department for a decision on whether to file an appeal at all. The deliberation at that level consumed most of the available time.
Once the decision to appeal was taken, the matter was referred to the office of the Advocate General, Punjab. It was done because, the affidavit states, it was considered “an important policy matter” requiring the AG’s personal attention for marking to a specific counsel. A Deputy Advocate General was formally deputed to handle the case only on May 12, 2026. The LPA was filed the following day, May 13, which is six days after the limitation period had expired.
The government had then to ask the court to condone that delay and allow the appeal to proceed.
What the affidavit reveals
Beyond the bare timeline, the condonation application reveals something about how the Punjab government processes decisions that affect lakhs of its own employees and pensioners.
A court order with a June 30 compliance deadline — one that the government considered significant enough to contest at the Division Bench level and to classify as “an important policy matter” — sat in internal circulation for the better part of three weeks before counsel was even designated. The Advocate General’s office was approached only after the higher-level decision was finalised, which itself came after the file had already travelled up the chain.
The six-day Punjab DA appeal delay is, in one sense, a procedural footnote. Courts routinely condone short delays when sufficient cause is shown. But the cause shown here — bureaucratic file movement and internal policy deliberation — is the government’s own explanation, under oath, for why it moved at the pace it did on a matter it now calls critically important to the state’s fiscal framework.
The same government has argued before the Division Bench that implementing the DA judgment would impose “immediate and substantial financial burden” and cause “cascading consequences on the State exchequer.” It has sought an urgent stay. It described the matter to the AG’s office as requiring priority handling.
None of that urgency, the affidavit suggests, was present in the 24 days that followed the judgment’s upload.
Punjab DA appeal delay: The status
The application prays that the delay of six days in filing the LPA be condoned and that the appeal be admitted for hearing.
The main appeal — which argues that the Cabinet’s 2021 DA commitment was merely an “endeavour” and not an enforceable obligation, and that the ₹14,191 crore liability cannot be discharged on a court-mandated timeline — is pending before the Division Bench. No stay of the April 8 judgment has been reported as granted so far. The division bench took up the case on May 21 and adjourned the matter to May 25, after the Punjab additional advocate general, Anu Chatrath sought time to seek instructions from the state chief secretary and address arguments.
The June 30 deadline for full DA payment and the July 2 date for the Chief Secretary’s compliance affidavit remain in force unless and until the Division Bench rules otherwise.
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