Case: Life Insurance Corporation Of India Vs. India Automobiles And Company

Section 64-C of the Tamil Nadu Estates (Abolition and Conversion into Ryotwari) Act, 1948, which ran as follows :- "64-C. Finality of orders passed under this Act - (1) Any order passed by the Government or other authority under this Act in respect of matters to be determined for the ,purposes of this Act shall, subject only to any appeal or revision provided bv or under this Act, be final. (2) No such order shall be liable to be questioned in any Court of law. The State Governments plea was rejected by the High Court. In appeal, the State contended before this Court that every refusal of a ryotwari patta by a Settlement Officer in an inquiry under Section 11 involves a decision on his part that either the applicant is not a ryot or the land is not ryoti land; in the instant cases it was the latter and such decision on the nature or character of the land has been given a finality under Section 64-C which cannot be questioned in a Court of law. Therefore, it was urged that the civil Courts jurisdiction to adjudicate upon the nature or character of the suit lands must be held to have been excluded or ousted. After discussing several decisions in regard to the exclusion of a civil Courts jurisdiction as well as the provisions of the Act, the Court pointed out that the terms of Section 64-C alone will not be decisive on the point of ouster of the civil Courts jurisdiction. The observations made by the Court in paras 13 and 14 have relevance to the present case and need not be set out here in extenso. ( 23 ) WE are of opinion, in the light of the decided cases referred to above, that the contention on behalf of the respondents has to be accepted. We are concerned with the jurisdiction of a civil Court. The extensive jurisdiction conferred on civil courts under S. 9 of the Code of Civil Procedure should not be curtailed without a specific statutory warrant or except on some clear principle. There is nothing in the Tamil Nadu Rent Control Act which,in any way, takes away, or narrows down, the civil Courts jurisdiction as, for example, there is, in the Delhi Rent Control Act (S. 50 ). As to principle, whether we look at it on the analogy of res judicata or adopt the approach of Sri Iyer as to whether the order in the earlier proceedings is to be treated as an order that is null and void or merely one that is valid until set aside, the answer has to turn on the true nature and scope of the jurisdiction conferred on the. Rent Controller under the Act. Is it possible, we have to ask ourselves, having regard to the context, scheme and terms of the legislation, that the statute could have envisaged the Rent Controller (and the authorities to whom appeal or revision could be preferred from his orders) to be final authorities to adjudicate on issues of title also ? The answer, in our opinion, has to be in the negative. Section 4 of the Rent Control Act, as already pointed out, provides only a machinery for fixation of fair rent in respect of certain premises. It is the quantum of fair rent that arises for determination by the Rent Controller. There is no doubt that, since an application for this purpose cannot lie except at the instance of a landlord or a tenant, the Rent Controller has to deal with this incidentally but this is not one of the direct issues before the Rent Controller. If, and only if, this relationship exists between the parties, the Rent Controller steps in for a limited purpose to determine what the fair rent is and then fades out of the picture. Where a fair rent is fixed by, a Controller, the Rent Control Act does not provide for a machinery for recovery of the amount. The amount has to be recovered by the landlord only by recourse to a civil Court. This gives an indication that the determination of the relationship that gives rise to the application is also not conclusive. This is indeed made clear by the provisions relating to eviction. We have already referred to the effect of the provisons of S. 10 (2) (vii) read with the proviso to S. 1 0 (1) and pointed out how jurisdiction to decide questions of title is denied to the Rent Controller. The position cannot be different under S. 4. Having regard to the much narrower scope of S. 4, it would be anomalous to read a wider jurisdiction to the Rent Controller thereunder than under S. 10. In our opinion, on a proper construction of the Rent Control Act, the question on which the jurisdiction of the civil Court is excluded is only the determination as to the fair rent of the premises. If the civil Court in this case had come to the conclusion that there is a relationship of a landlord and a tenant and that the LIC was entitled to recover the rent from the tenants, it will have to pass a decree in favour of the LIC on the basis of the fair rent fixed by the Rent Controller. It will not be open to the civil Court to re-determine the rent payable ,by the tenant to the landlord because that is a matter squarely and exclusively within the jurisdiction of the Rent Controller and, therefore, impliedly excluded from the purview of the civil Court. But his decision is not final on the issue that opens up his jurisdiction and cannot preclude an owner from contending, in a civil Court, that he should not be asked to pay rent for his own property to some one else. ( 24 ) FOR the reasons mentioned above, we are of the opinion that the High Court reached the correct conclusion and that this appeal has to fail.

Decision (1 = appeal accepted, 0 = rejected): 0

Explanation:
0[ds]( 11 ) SO far as the first question is concerned, we have no doubt that the Division Bench of the High Court has come to the correct conclusion. In our view, the conclusion of the learned single Judge that the lease Ex. P-1, executed by the co-owners of the property in favour of one of them was invalid was erroneous. Section 5 ofthe Transfer of Property Act, 1882, clearly envisages transfers of property by a person to , one or more living persons or to himself, or to himself and one or more other living persons". Whatever may be the position, in spite of this provision, in respect of a purported transfer by a person to himself alone (which is very often the position in the case of trusts) - which was considered by the House of Lords inRye v. Rye (1962 AC, there is no reason to hold that a contract between a person with himself and others is invalid. The Division Bench, we think, has rightly distinguished the decisions in Girish Chandra v. Srinath (3 CLJ 141) andRye v. Rye (1962 AC496 ). The observations of Lord Denning, extracted by the learned Judges are quite apposite to the situation in the present case( 12 ) ONCE this objection is out of the way, the question is whether the constructions put upon the leased land by the lessees formed part of the property conveyed to the L. I. C. Sri Parasaran pointed out that they did not and drew our attention to subsequent correspondence between the parties to show that even the L. I. C. had not claimed at any stage any rent in respect of the superstructures (apart from the contractual rent, which was in respect of the land) and that both parties have -all along been proceeding on the footing that the superstructure on item 1 belonged to the lessees. This appears to be correct but it cannot be conclusive of the rights of the parties. We have therefore gone carefully into the terms of Ex. P. 1 and Ex. P 3. They clearly make out that the superstructures put up by the lessee under Ex. P-1 were not included in the property conveyed under the terms of Ex. P-3 and that, whatever may be the rights of the LIC to evict the tenant with liberty to demolish the superstructure on the termination of the lease, it had no property in the superstructure so long as the lease subsisted. We, therefore, answer the first question posed by us in the affirmative( 23 ) WE are of opinion, in the light of the decided cases referred to above, that the contention on behalf of the respondents has to be accepted. We are concerned with the jurisdiction of a civil Court. The extensive jurisdiction conferred on civil courts under S. 9 of theCode of Civil Procedure should not be curtailed without a specific statutory warrant or except on some clear principle. There is nothing in the Tamil Nadu Rent Control Act which,in any way, takes away, or narrows down, the civil Courts jurisdiction as, for example, there is, in the Delhi Rent Control Act (S. 50 ). As to principle, whether we look at it on the analogy of res judicata or adopt the approach of Sri Iyer as to whether the order in the earlier proceedings is to be treated as an order that is null and void or merely one that is valid until set aside, the answer has to turn on the true nature and scope of the jurisdiction conferred on the. Rent Controller under the Act. Is it possible, we have to ask ourselves, having regard to the context, scheme and terms of the legislation, that the statute could have envisaged the Rent Controller (and the authorities to whom appeal or revision could be preferred from his orders) to be final authorities to adjudicate on issues of title also ? The answer, in our opinion, has to be in the negative. Section 4 of the Rent Control Act, as already pointed out, provides only a machinery for fixation of fair rent in respect of certain premises. It is the quantum of fair rent that arises for determination by the Rent Controller. There is no doubt that, since an application for this purpose cannot lie except at the instance of a landlord or a tenant, the Rent Controller has to deal with this incidentally but this is not one of the direct issues before the Rent Controller. If, and only if, this relationship exists between the parties, the Rent Controller steps in for a limited purpose to determine what the fair rent is and then fades out of the picture. Where a fair rent is fixed by, a Controller, the Rent Control Act does not provide for a machinery for recovery of the amount. The amount has to be recovered by the landlord only by recourse to a civil Court. This gives an indication that the determination of the relationship that gives rise to the application is also not conclusive. This is indeed made clear by the provisions relating to eviction. We have already referred to the effect of the provisons of S. 10 (2) (vii) read with the proviso to S. 1 0 (1) and pointed out how jurisdiction to decide questions of title is denied to the Rent Controller. The position cannot be different under S. 4. Having regard to the much narrower scope of S. 4, it would be anomalous to read a wider jurisdiction to the Rent Controller thereunder than under S. 10. In our opinion, on a proper construction of the Rent Control Act, the question on which the jurisdiction of the civil Court is excluded is only the determination as to the fair rent of the premises. If the civil Court in this case had come to the conclusion that there is a relationship of a landlord and a tenant and that the LIC was entitled to recover the rent from the tenants, it will have to pass a decree in favour of the LIC on the basis of the fair rent fixed by the Rent Controller. It will not be open to the civil Court to re-determine the rent payable ,by the tenant to the landlord because that is a matter squarely and exclusively within the jurisdiction of the Rent Controller and, therefore, impliedly excluded from the purview of the civil Court. But his decision is not final on the issue that opens up his jurisdiction and cannot preclude an owner from contending, in a civil Court, that he should not be asked to pay rent for his own property to some one else.