A Noida factory worker walked off the job one day in May 2012 without telling anyone where he was going, why he was leaving, or when he would be back. He did not send a letter. He did not file a leave application. He did not pick up the phone. Yet somehow, over the next decade, he convinced two separate courts that the fault lay with his employer — and walked away with reinstatement orders, back wages, and a string of consequential benefits attached. It took the Supreme Court of India to undo all of it. What happenedArjun Gupta had been employed as a Molder with a private engineering company engaged in manufacturing and designing water features, since August 2006. On 14 May 2012, he stopped coming to work without informing anyone at the company. The company sent him a registered notice four days later, asking him to explain his absence and warning of strict action if he did not respond. The notice went to the permanent address Gupta himself had provided at the time of joining. He never replied. Gupta later claimed he had returned to the office on 8 June 2012 and tried to rejoin duty but was turned away and illegally removed from service. He filed a complaint before the Deputy Labour Commissioner in Gautam Budh Nagar shortly after, setting off a chain of legal proceedings that would take years to resolve. The long road through courts The dispute was referred to the Labour Court in 2013. In February 2022, the Labour Court passed an ex-parte award in Gupta's favour, directing reinstatement with full back wages. The company only learned of the award in July 2022 and immediately challenged it. After the Allahabad High Court remanded the matter back for a fresh hearing, the Labour Court again ruled in Gupta's favour in October 2023 — this time directing reinstatement with 50 per cent back wages from the date his service ended, and full salary thereafter. The company went back to the High Court. The High Court upheld the Labour Court's award, noting that the company's notice had been sent to Gupta's permanent address in Bihar rather than to where he was actually living in Gautam Budh Nagar at the time. The company then approached the Supreme Court. What the Supreme Court found The court did not accept the High Court's reasoning on the address issue. It noted that the company had sent the notice to the only address available in its records — the address Gupta himself had provided when he joined. If he had moved, the obligation to inform his employer of that change rested entirely on him. He could not, the court held, take advantage of his own failure to do so. On Gupta's claim that his absence was due to his mother's serious illness and that he had verbally informed his superior before leaving, the court was equally firm. There was no documentary evidence of any kind to support either claim. No letter, no leave application, no written communication of any sort had been sent to the employer during the entire period of absence. His claim that he was turned away when he tried to rejoin in June 2012 was similarly unsupported — no evidence had been placed on record to back it up. The court concluded that the Labour Court and the High Court had both erred in granting relief without any documentary basis for Gupta's version of events. The reinstatement order, the back wages direction, and all connected benefits were accordingly cancelled. Gupta's claim stands rejected in its entirety.