Summary: Armed Forces Tribunal allowed Appellant’s OA and quashed the order of Admonition passed against him – In appeal before SC, appellant sought compensation for the wrongful order – Allowing appeal, SC observed: Small excesses like overtaking the vehicle of one’s senior at a railway crossing may be an incident of indiscipline in defense services, but the balance and proportion that needs to be maintained between such an infraction and its punishment will always be at the core of good governance. If the balance is not maintained, the distinction between bad governance, impropriety, unfairness and inhuman treatment is not much. The Tribunal is right in holding that a small incident has unnecessarily grown beyond proportion. When the institutions that we build grow beyond proportion, officers act mechanically and many a times helplessly, ignore the simple and readily available remedies that are available in our normal lives. We would have thought that an incident like this would have ended if a senior officer had at the right time intervened and resolved the issue by taking into account the emotional aspect of the dispute- Respondents directed to pay an amount of Rs. 1 lakh to the appellant towards compensation for having suffered an unnecessary and a longdrawn litigation that was foisted on him.