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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

HC scraps land tribunal
-The Telegraph
 
Calcutta High Court today scrapped a 14-year-old tribunal that had been hearing all land and tenancy disputes involving the state government, saying the judiciary’s minority status in the set-up ran contrary to the Constitution.

Today’s order means that the nearly 1 lakh cases pending with the tribunal will be shifted to the high court.

The former Left Front government had enacted the West Bengal Land Reforms and Tenancy Act, 1997, to speed up property disputes pending in the high court. The act had empowered the government to form the Land Reforms and Tenancy Tribunal, where the majority of the members were appointed by the state.

“The Constitution says tribunals have to be under the judiciary and not the administration,” ruled the bench of Justices Bhaskar Bhattacharya, Tapan Dutta and Prasenjit Mondal.

“The act had empowered the government to appoint one judicial member and an executive member to form the tribunal. The appellate tribunal comprised a lone member from the judiciary and two executive officers appointed by the state. So the tribunal was controlled by the administration and not the judiciary. According to the Constitution, a tribunal should be formed with members appointed by the judiciary and its majority should be from the judiciary,” the order said.

The government pleader, Ashok Banerjee, said the state was likely to move the Supreme Court against the order. “We believe the law is valid,” Banerjee told The Telegraph tonight.

Private landlords did not come under the 1997 law. But the tribunal heard disputes relating to the Thika Tenancy Act, the Estate Acquisition Act and the Restoration of Alienated Land Act, which have the government locked in feud with a private tenant on issues such as rent and occupancy.

Under the Estate Acquisition Act, the government can take over the property of an estate for its own purposes or as a penal measure for having run up tax dues. “Since the 1997 law came into force, estate owners moved the Land Reforms and Tenancy Tribunal if they were opposed to the acquisition. The loser of the case moved the appellate tribunal. The judgment of the appellate body was challenged in the high court,” said advocate Sailendu Rakshit.

Similarly, a dispute between a thika tenant — one who has been occupying for years a property that had been taken over by the state — and the government also ran its course through the tribunal and the appellate forum before moving to the high court.

“If the government acquires a plot and realises later that it also needs the adjacent land, it acquires it under Restoration of Alienated Land Act. In such cases, too, aggrieved owners moved the tribunal. All these cases will now come directly to the high court,” the advocate said.

Although the two-step tribunal made the road to the high court look circuitous, lawyers said they also acted as a sieve and ensured that fewer property disputes burdened the judicial system. “Many disputes were resolved at the tribunal stage,” a lawyer said.

The CPM’s Surjya Kanta Mishra, the land and land reforms minister when the tribunal was formed, said: “There were legal disputes. We won the case and then the tribunal was formed. I have to go through a copy of today’s high court order to find out about its objections.”

Today’s order followed a petition by the owners of Popat and Kutecha Properties, whose lawyer, Saptangshu Basu, said: “A tribunal where judges are appointed by the state curbs the independence of the judiciary.”

The high court said the act would have to be amended and the chief justice or his representative empowered to appoint the judges in the new tribunal.