*THE HON’BLE SRI JUSTICE C.V. NAGARJUNA REDDY +WRIT PETITION No.11005 of 2001 % Dated: 07-11-2008 # Madamaneni Chinnaswamy (died) His LRs. Petitioners VERSUS $ The Joint Collector, Chittoor, Chittoor District & others. Respondents ! Counsel for the Petitioners: Mr. S.V. Muni Reddy ^Counsel for Respondents 1&2: GP for Revenue. Counsel for respondents 4&5: Sri P.V. Vidyasagar <GIST: > HEAD NOTE: ? Cases referred 1. 1988 (2) ALT 304 2. AIR 1969 SC 1297 3. 1981 (2) ALT 280 4. 1989 (1) ALT 51 (SN) 5. 1995 (3) ALT 330 (DB) 6. 1996 (2) An.W.R. 511 7. AIR 1988 SC 688 8. (1984) 1 SCC 125 9. (1994) 1 SCC 44 10. (2003) 7 SCC 667 IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUDICATURE, ANDHRA PRADESH AT HYDERABAD (Special Original Jurisdiction) FRIDAY, THE SEVENTH DAY OF NOVEMBER, TWO THOUSAND EIGHT ONLY PRESENT: THE HON’BLE MR. JUSTICE C.V.NAGARJUNA REDDY WRIT PETITION No.11005 of 2001 Between: Madamaneni Chinnaswamy (died) His LRs. … Petitioners AND The Joint Collector, Chittoor, Chittoor District & others. … Respondents Counsel for the petitioners : Sri S.V. Muni Reddy Counsel for respondents 1& 2: GP for Revenue Counsel for respondents 4& 5: Sri P.V. Vidyasagar This Court made the following: THE HON’BLE SRI JUSTICE C.V.NAGARJUNA REDDY WRIT PETITION No.11005 of 2001 ORDER:- This writ petition, originally ﬁled by Madamaneni Chinnaswamy, raised the issue of legality and validity of orders dated 10.11.1995, 16.06.2000 and 16.05.2001 passed by respondent No.2, the Revenue Divisional Oﬃcer, Chittoor and respondent No.1 respectively. The petitioner having died, pending the writ petition, petitioner Nos.2 to 8 were brought on record as his legal representatives. For convenience, the deceased original writ petitioner is hereinafter referred to as the petitioner. The petitioner purchased an extent of Ac.0.63 cents in Sy.No.128/E of Govindareddipalle Village, Thavanampalle Mandal, Chittoor District under registered sale deed dated 06.11.1967 from Sri Venkatswamy, Rajamma, Govindaswamy and Gangulaiah. He also purchased another extent of Ac.2.18 cents in Sy.No.129/2 of the same village under registered sale deed dated 26.11.1974. While he had been in possession and enjoyment of the said lands, respondent Nos.3 to 6 approached respondent No.1 with representation dated 11.09.1995, which was evidently forwarded by respondent No.1 to respondent No.2 for taking action on the said representation. By the said representation, respondent Nos.3 to 6 sought for restoration of possession of the said lands on the ground that the same were originally assigned to their grandfather late M.Gangulaiah and that they were in possession of the petitioner. It appears, respondent No.2 issued a notice to the petitioner calling for his explanation and in response thereto, the petitioner submitted his explanation. By order dated 10.11.1995, respondent No.2 held that the petitioner and his family members are ﬁnancially sound and they are having Ac.8.38 cents jointly apart from three members of his family being salaried employees working in Central Government service and the sale transactions in favour of the petitioner are contrary to the provisions of Section 3(2) and (3) of the Andhra Pradesh Assigned Lands (Prohibition of Transfers) Act, 1977 (for short, ‘the Act’) and restored the lands to respondent Nos.3 to 6. The said order was questioned by the petitioner before the Revenue Divisional Oﬃcer. The petitioner speciﬁcally urged before the appellate authority that the property in question was purchased by him bona fide for consideration and falls within the exception contained in Section 3(5) of the Act. The appellate authority conﬁrmed the order of respondent No.2 for the same reasons as were assigned by the latter. Respondent No.1, having followed suit by dismissing the revision petition ﬁled by the petitioner, the present writ petition is ﬁled calling in question these three orders. Sri S.V. Muni Reddy, learned counsel for the petitioners urged that all the three authorities committed serious error in not considering the explanation oﬀered by the petitioner and that on the admitted facts of the case, the petitioner was entitled to the benefit of Section 3(5) of the Act. Learned Assistant Government Pleader for Revenue (Assignments) and Sri P.V. Vidyasagar, learned counsel representing respondent Nos.3 to 6 opposed the contentions of the learned counsel for the petitioners and submitted that the orders passed by the three authorities do not call for any interference. They further submitted that the petitioner failed to raise his speciﬁc pleas and prove that the ingredients of Section 3(5) of the Act are satisfied. A perusal of the record shows that the petitioner ﬁled his explanation to the show cause notice and the sum and substance of the said explanation is that he purchased the abovementioned properties under registered sale deeds for proper considerations from his own paternal uncle Gangulaiah and his other family members. While referring to the entire lands possessed by his family, the petitioner stated that his family consisted of four brothers, namely, Sri Chinnaswamy, Sri Mogulaiah, Sri M. Ponnuswamy and Sri M.Doraswamy. He also mentioned the names of Sri Devanand and Sri Dorai Raj, who are the sons of Sri Doraswamy, as constituting joint family. He mentioned that after purchasing the property the petitioner dug a well and brought the lands for cultivation by raising mango grove ten years earlier apart from raising groundnut crop by spending about Rs.10,000/-. He requested to regularize his possession by granting patta. Respondent No.2 in his order failed to even refer to the explanation ﬁled by the petitioner, let alone considering the same. The appellate authority also made a similar approach. The manner of disposal of revision by respondent No.1 is no exception as he also failed to deal with the issue as to whether the petitioner satisfied the ingredients of Section 3(5) of the Act. With a view to prohibit transfer of assigned lands in favour of well to do persons, the Act has been made. Section 2(3) deﬁned “landless poor person” as a person, who owns an extent of not more than 1.011715 hectares (two and half acres) of wet land or 2.023430 hectares (ﬁve acres) of dry land and who has no other means of livelihood. Section 3(1) prohibits transfer of land assigned to a landless poor person for the purposes of cultivation or as a house site and declares that such a transfer shall be deemed never to have taken place and no right or title in such assigned land shall vest in any person by such transfer. Sub-Section (5) of Section 3, however, provided an exception to the general rule in favour of the persons who purchased the assigned lands being landless poor person in good faith and for valuable consideration from the original assignee or his transferee prior to the commencement of the Act and is in possession of such person for purposes of cultivation or as a house site on the date of such commencement. Section 4 empowers the District Collector or any other oﬃcer not below the rank of Mandal Revenue Oﬃcer to take possession of the assigned land, after evicting the person in possession and restore the assigned land to the original assignee or his legal heir, if the transfer was made for the ﬁrst time and resume to the Government in case of subsequent transfers. The contents of the explanation submitted by the petitioner reveal that he is closely related to the assignee from whom he purchased the property by paying consideration under registered sale deeds and his joint family comprised as many as six persons. He also pleaded that he has been cultivating the property by raising mango garden and groundnut crop and that he spent about Rs.10,000/- for making the land ﬁt for cultivation. Though the petitioner has not speciﬁcally referred to the provisions of Section 3(5) in his explanation, the explanation nevertheless refers to the ingredients of Section 3(5). The reason for not making a speciﬁc reference to Section 3(5) in his explanation is quite obvious, namely, that the petitioner is an illiterate belonging to the Scheduled Caste community and a perusal of the explanation shows that he took the assistance of another person, who wrote the explanation in Telugu and the petitioner aﬃxed his thumb impression. Mere non-reference of Section 3(5) would not have absolved respondent No.2 from considering the petitioner’s explanation with reference to the said provision. Though the petitioner speciﬁcally invoked the provision of Section 3(5) before the appellate authority and respondent No.1 in the appeal and revision ﬁled by him respectively, they also failed to consider the petitioner’s case from the said prospective. Learned counsel for respondent Nos.3 to 6 urged that the case may be remitted back to the lower authorities for consideration of this aspect. Having given my serious thought to this submission, I have not felt inclined to accept the same, because the petitioners are vexed with this litigation, which was initiated at the instance of respondent Nos.3 to 6 for more than 23 years. I feel that it is in the interests of both the warring groups that a quietus is placed on the litigation. Therefore, I decided to dispose of this writ petition on merits on the basis of the material available on record. On the facts noted above, the main point that arises for consideration in this writ petition is whether the petitioner satisfied the ingredients of Section 3(5) of the Act. In his order respondent No.2 came to the conclusion that the family of the petitioner was wealthy, as it owned Ac.8.38 cents of dry land. Another additional ground on which the order of respondent No.2 was based was that three members of the petitioner’s family, namely, Sri Ponnuswamy, Raju and Sulochana are working in Income Tax Department, Tirupati and living separately and that the petitioner is living in a two storied building at Govindareddipalle. With regard to the extent of the lands possessed by the petitioner’s family, respondent No.2 has not indicated whether the said lands were owned by the joint family at the time of purchase of the properties by the petitioner. Be that as it may, even assuming that they were owned and possessed by the family at the time of purchase, the total extent owned by the joint family, even according to respondent No.2, was Ac.8.38 cents. The law is well settled that while determining the status of a landless poor person, shares of all the major members of the joint family have to be computed on the basis of notional partition. (Boddeda Samba Murthy vs. The Tahsildar, Anakpalli[1]). Even according to respondent No.2, the family of the petitioner consisted of the petitioner, his wife, Smt. Sulochana, Sri K. Raja and Sri M. Dorairaj. There will be at least three shares excluding the petitioner’s wife from the notional partition and each member of the joint family will get about Ac.2.65 cents of dry land and each of them can purchase at least Ac.2.35 cents of dry land or about Ac.1.15 cents of wet land to claim the beneﬁt under Section 3(5) of the Act. Admittedly, the total extent of land purchased in the name of the petitioner was Ac.2.92 cents, which is evidently dry land. Even if the said land is considered as wet land, the petitioner’s family, consisting of not less than three members, still continued to be landless poor persons. As regards the ﬁnding of respondent No.2 that Sri Ponnuswamy, Raju and Smt. Sulochana are working in Income Tax Department, Tirupati, and that the petitioner is living in a two storied building, respondent No.2 failed to give speciﬁc ﬁnding as to whether they were in employment by the time the lands were purchased in the years 1967 and 1974. At any rate, the said three persons are stated to have been living separately at Tirupati and there is nothing to indicate that from the salaries they were getting whether they were contributing anything to the family of the petitioner at the time when the lands were purchased. The ground that the petitioner is living in a two-storied building is also too vague in the absence of a speciﬁc ﬁnding that at the time of purchase of the lands, such a building was in existence. It is quite possible that the petitioner by dint of his hard work would have constructed the house at a later point of time. Though not speciﬁcally pleaded by the petitioners, this case raises a fundamental issue as to whether the power conferred on the authorities under Section 4 of the Act can be exercised without any limit of time. While existence of power is one thing, exercise of such power is quite another thing and the Courts always maintained the line of distinction between the two. In a plethora of judicial pronouncements, the Apex Court and this Court have read limitation into the statutory provisions conferring suo motu powers on the authorities concerned. In State of Gujarat vs. Patel Raghav Natha and others[2] while dealing with Section 211 of the Bombay Land Revenue Code, 1879 which conferred revisional powers on the State Government and any revenue oﬃcer not inferior in rank to an Assistant or Deputy Collector or a Superintendent of Survey, held that though the said provision did not prescribe period of limitation for exercising revisional powers, such a power must be exercised in reasonable time and what is reasonable time must be determined by the facts of the case and the nature of the order being revised. I n A. Kodanda Rao vs. Government of Andhra Pradesh[3] a Division Bench of this Court dealt with the power vested in the Director of Settlement under Section 52 of the Andhra Pradesh (Andhra Area) Estates (Abolition and Conversion into Ryotwari) Act, 1948 and held: “There can be no doubt that where no period of limitation is prescribed by the Act or the Rules made thereunder for the exercise of the suo motu power of revision, the exercise of that power cannot be impugned on the ground that it is barred by limitation. No period of limitation can be imposed otherwise than by statute or the rules made thereunder. But nonetheless, merely because power is vested in an authority to revise the orders of the subordinate authorities so motu, (as observed by our learned brother Jeevan Reddy, J. in the order under appeal) “the power has to be exercised within a reasonable time”. In our view in cases where no period of limitation is prescribed under the statute or the rules made thereunder, for exercise of Revisional powers suo motu, the question for consideration is not whether the exercise of the power is barred by limitation for in the absence of a period of limitation prescribed under the Act, the question of bar of limitation cannot arise it is a question of the reasonable period of limitation within which that power should be exercised where the question is one exercising that power within a reasonable time and what is reasonable period would undoubtedly be dependant upon the facts and circumstances of each case.” I n S.B. Dharma Reddy vs. The Director of Settlements, A.P. Hyderabad and another [4] a Division Bench held that exercise of revisional power by the Director under Section 52 of the Estates Abolition Act after a lapse of 27 years from the date of the grant of patta is totally unreasonable and oppressive. I n Smt. P. Mangamma and others vs. The Women’s Cooperative Housing Society Ltd., Hyderabad[5] a Division Bench of this Court dealing with the revisional power exercised by the Collector under Section 166-B of the Andhra Pradesh (Telangana Area) Land Recovery Act, 1317 Fasli invalidated the revisional proceedings initiated by the District Collector after a lapse of 31 years from the date of assignment of the lands on the ground that the same was totally irrational, unreasonable and violative of fair play in administrative action. This view was reiterated by this Court in Ibrahimpatnam Taluk Vyavasaya Coolie Sangham vs. K.Suresh Reddy and others[6] which relied on the judgments of the Supreme Court in State of Gujarat (2 supra), Hindusthan Times vs. Union of India[7], Mnsoram vs. S.P.Pathak [8] and Ramchand vs. Union of India[9]. The Division Bench held that the absence of prescription of any limitation period for exercise of suo motu power does not authorize the authority vested with the power to invoke it after a lapse of any length of time, since exercise of an administrative or quasi judicial power is necessarily linked to the concept of rule of law and exercise of a power after a long lapse of time is prima facie arbitrary. The judgment in Ibrahimpatnam Taluk Vyavasaya Coolie Sangham (6 supra) was questioned in the Supreme Court. In its judgment in Ibrahimpatnam Taluk Vyavasaya Coolie Sangham vs. K. Suresh Reddy[10] the Supreme Court upheld the judgment of this Court and held that the power vested in the Collector under Section 50-B(4) of the Andhra Pradesh (Telangana Area) Tenancy and Agricultural Lands Act, 1950 (for short, ‘the 1950 Act’) cannot be invoked without any limit of time. In that case the order of Tahsildar validating the plain paper sale transactions under Section 50-B of the 1950 Act, which was confirmed in appeal was sought to be revised by exercising the suo motu power of revision vested under Section 50-B (4) of the 1950 Act by the Joint Collector. The aggrieved parties approached this Court by way of civil revision petitions and writ petitions, which were allowed. While aﬃrming the view taken by this Court, the Supreme Court held that exercise of suo motu power after 14 or 15 years is ipso facto unreasonable and such exercise of power with unexplained delay would arbitrarily unsettle settled fact situations and expectations. This case gives rise to an exactly similar situation, which was dealt with by the Supreme Court and this Court in the various judgments referred to above. Though the context in which the power was exercised varied, the ultimate result is similar to the cases referred to above. No one raised his little ﬁnger for about 28 years from the ﬁrst sale transaction and about 24 years from the second transaction. Suddenly in the year 1995 respondent Nos.3 to 6 woke up from the slumber and made a representation to respondent No.2. If respondent No.2 was committed to implement the provisions of the Act, there can be no reason whatsoever for him not to have initiated action under Section 4 from the time of the Act coming into force. The sale transactions are registered in the oﬃce of the Sub-Registrar concerned. If respondent No.2 was diligent, he would have easily collected the registration particulars from time to time and initiated proceedings for resumption of the land within a reasonable time. For 18 years after the Act coming into force, he did not take any steps in this direction. He initiated the proceedings after receiving the representation from respondent Nos.3 to 6 under whose nose the sale transactions have taken place. It is well to remember that the petitioner also belongs to the Scheduled Caste and is a close relative of the assignee. If there were lack of bona ﬁdes on the part of the petitioner in purchasing the property, respondent Nos.3 to 6 would not have kept quiet for more than 25 years allowing the petitioner to enjoy the property without any demur. Respondent No.2, without applying his mind to these hard realities, exercised his power under Section 4 nearly 28 and 24 years after the two sale transactions have taken place. During this time lag, undisputedly, the petitioner dug a well and developed the land by spending considerable money, making it ﬁt for cultivation. He raised mango garden, which is admitted by respondent No.2. Respondent No.2 failed to realize the enormous harm that will be caused to the petitioner who acquired the property by parting with hard earned money and developed the same by spending his sweat and blood. While in a case of this nature, the very propriety of respondent Nos.3 to 6 in racking up the issue after more than 25 years is highly questionable, the Act does not certainly give a license to the revenue authorities by ignoring the ground reality that by eﬄux of time the person, who purchased the property, developed a deep interest and expectations therein. To unsettle such settled fact situations and defeat the expectations is a death-knell for the purchaser. While the intendment of the Act was certainly to prevent transfer of assigned lands from the gullible assignees, at the same time the process of resumption on the basis of stale claims shall not leave a trail of disaster for the bona ﬁde purchasers after passage of decades. Quite often the assignees or their successors, who voluntarily sell their lands turn around, many years after sale by feigning innocence and ignorance and the innumerable instances which led to resumption and restoration of the land to the original assignee or his successors-in-interest in case of ﬁrst violation, has virtually become a proﬁt making activity for the assignees to ﬁrst sell and then claim restoration of the land. The exercise of power under Section 4, which is intended to protect the interests of gullible assignees shall not be allowed to become nightmare to the equally gullible purchasers, who purchase the assigned lands out of sheer ignorance of the prohibition contained in the Act and the consequences of such purchases. In their anxiety to do justice to one section of the society, the authorities cannot harm the interests of another section by subjecting them to long process of litigation many years after the assigned land is purchased. In other words, a legislation, which is a boon for one section of the society, shall not become a bane for others, in its purported implementation. On the basis of the abundance of authority, I am of the considered opinion that even while exercising power under a statute such as the Act in the instant case, the authorities cannot act mechanically ignoring the long delay in either the aggrieved party approaching the authorities or initiating suo motu proceedings. In either case, unless there are proper and suﬃcient reasons such as blatant fraud played by the purchaser of the assigned land and the same which despite due diligence did not come to light, the authorities cannot initiate proceedings beyond reasonable period after the assigned land is sold. Lest the remedy will become worse than the disease. From the material discussed supra, I am of the view that the case of the petitioner squarely falls within the provisions of Section 3(5) of the Act as he was a landless poor person and bona ﬁde purchased the property for valuable consideration. I further hold that respondent No.2 ought not to have initiated action on the stale representation of respondent Nos.3 to 6 after long lapse of time. The writ petition is accordingly allowed and the order of respondent No.1, who conﬁrmed the orders of the Revenue Divisional Oﬃcer, Chittoor and respondent No.2 are quashed. ____________________________ C.V.NAGARJUNA REDDY, J Date: 07.11.2008 ES LR Copies to be marked. [1] 1988 (2) ALT 304 [2] AIR 1969 SC 1297 [3] 1981 (2) ALT 280 [4] 1989 (1) ALT 51 (SN) [5] 1995 (3) ALT 330 (DB) [6] 1996 (2) An.W.R. 511 [7] AIR 1988 SC 688 [8] (1984) 1 SCC 125 [9] (1994) 1 SCC 44 [10] (2003) 7 SCC 667