<b>Brief Case</b>: A weekly selection of key court orders

A weekly selection of key court orders

Searching for the meaning of ‘industry’

The meaning of the word ‘industry’ does not pose any particular difficulty to ordinary people. But judges of the Supreme Court were struggling to interpret the term found in the Industrial Disputes Act for nearly four decades and the final word has not been spoken yet. Last week, a seven-judge Constitution bench referred the question to a nine-judge bench in the case, State of Uttar Pradesh versus Jaibir Singh. The issue came to the fore in the 1978 judgment in the Bangalore Water Supply case, when the employees’ rights under the Act were denied