New Delhi, Jun 27: In an important ruling which will have significant implications at workplaces, the Supreme Court on Tuesday held that superiors cannot be held responsible for abetment if an employee commits suicide due to heavy workload.  The ruling came in response to a plea of a superior who sought to quash an FIR registered against him after one of his junior employees committed suicide.

Kishor Parashar, an employee at Aurangabad office of the deputy director of education in Maharashtra government, committed suicide in August 2017. His wife accused her husband’s superior officer of abetting the suicide and filed a complaint. She alleged the superior used to assign a heavy workload to Parashar, stopped salary for a month and threatened to stop increment.

After the Aurangabad police registered an FIR, the senior officer moved the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court for quashing the FIR. However, the High Court had dismissed his plea and said, “The facts indicate that there was no direct abetment and the applicants cannot have any intention that the deceased should commit suicide.

The senior officer then moved to the Supreme Court which on Tuesday said a superior officer assigning a load of work to an employee could not make grounds for abetment of suicide charge. A bench of Arun Mishra and U U Lalit also quashed the FIR against the superior officer.

“It is true that if a situation is created deliberately so as to drive a person to commit suicide, there would be room for attracting Section 306 of the IPC (abetment to suicide). However, the facts on record in the present case are inadequate and insufficient (to reach that conclusion)," Justice Lalit, who authored the judgment, said.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jun 27, 2018 08:59 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).