Recruiting married persons into JAG expensive: Centre to HC

Recruitment of married men and women into the Indian Army's legal branch, JAG, will be expensive for the Centre as it will have to incur "heavy expenditure" to find replacements for such recruits when they are absent from training due to their marital obligations, the government has claimed in the Delhi High Court.

The submission by the central government has been made in an affidavit filed before a bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar which is hearing a lawyer's PIL that alleged "institutionalised discrimination" against married women by not inducting them into the Judge Advocate General (JAG) Department.

After the petition by lawyer Kush Kalra was filed in May 2016, the Army had come out with a corrigendum in August last year which had said that even married men are barred from recruitment into the JAG service.

The reason behind the Army's decision, according to the affidavit, was that "if the bar of marriage is removed, it will lead to huge practical difficulties as a result of which very heavy expenditure would have to be incurred by the respondents (Centre and Army) to make arrangements for substitutes of the trainees during their absence for a period necessitated by domestic needs resulting from marriage."