Gurugram: A shop, a garbage heap, and a legal battle that outlived the litigants who started it feature in a dispute that the Supreme Court settled this month, delivering a sharp reminder to high courts about the limits of their revision powers.
In a judgment dated 21 July, a bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and Augustine George Masih set aside a 2018 Punjab and Haryana High Court order, restoring an eviction decree that two lower forums, the Rent Controller, Nabha, and the Appellate Authority, Patiala, had passed way back in 2010 and 2011.
The case began when Nabha resident Kamla Devi, then in her late 70s, filed a suit to evict her tenant, Thakar Dass, from a shop he was paying Rs 112.50 a month to occupy. Her grounds were twofold — non-payment of rent, and a bona fide requirement of the shop for herself and her son, Madan Mohan.
The rent issue was resolved fairly early. In 2003, the tenant cleared the entire outstanding amount along with interest and costs, a total of Rs 8,740, and that was accepted. But the second ground, the landlady’s claim that she genuinely needed the shop, became the real battleground.
The tenant’s defence rested on scepticism as much as law: how likely was it, he argued, that an 80-year-old woman actually wanted to start running a business? He also pointed out that Kamla Devi’s son already ran another shop nearby, suggesting the entire case was really being driven by him, and, crucially, that one of the three shops the family owned was lying vacant, which meant they didn’t need to evict him at all.
Both the Rent Controller and the Appellate Authority examined the argument and rejected it, ruling firmly in the landlady’s favour across every one of the eight issues framed in the case. When Kamla Devi passed away during the proceedings, the Appellate Authority held that her son’s independent need for the shop was enough to keep the case alive.
High court’s turn
That should have settled the matter. Instead, the case went into a revision petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court, where a single judge took an entirely different view.
The high court held that Kamla Devi had not approached the court with “clean hands”.
Her family, it noted, owned a third shop that had been left out of her pleadings altogether — she had denied its existence at first, and only in her evidence admitted that her other son, Adarsh Mohan, was linked to it.
That shop, it turned out, wasn’t being used for any business. It was simply where garbage was being stored. The high court took the view that the Rent Controller and Appellate Authority had misread this fact, and on that basis, reversed the eviction order entirely in 2018.
Supreme Court response
It is this reasoning that the Supreme Court took apart — and did so with a memorable line. Even accepting that the third shop was being used to store garbage, the bench asked, what exactly was wrong with that?
“The old saying is, ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’,” the judgment notes, adding that the court failed to see “what is wrong” with a family choosing to leave one shop empty, or filled with junk, while genuinely needing another for a different purpose, in this case intending to convert it into a boutique.
More importantly, the court held that a shop lying unused, garbage or no garbage, was a finding of fact that both the Rent Controller and Appellate Authority had already examined and ruled upon — concurrently. And that, the Supreme Court said, is precisely where the high court overstepped.
The bigger legal point
The judgment goes on to lay out, at some length, exactly why the high court’s approach was legally impermissible. Citing a line of precedents — from a 1991 ruling in Masjid Kacha Tank, Nahan vs Tuffail Mohammed, to the Constitution Bench decision in Hindustan Petroleum Corp Ltd vs Dilbahar Singh (2014), to the more recent Ambadas Khanduji Shinde vs Ashok Sadashiv Mamurkar (2017), the Supreme Court reiterated a consistent principle: under Section 115 of the Civil Procedure Code, a high court exercising revisional jurisdiction cannot reappreciate evidence or substitute its own view of the facts for that of the courts below.
Revisional power, the court noted, is meant to correct jurisdictional errors or serious illegality in how a case was decided, not function as a second appellate review of evidence. Simply because a different conclusion is possible on the same set of facts does not give a high court the authority to interfere, especially when two courts below have already agreed on the same finding.
The judgment also traces the deeper legal architecture around the case—devoting several paragraphs to what “bona fide requirement” actually means under India’s rent control laws.
Quoting earlier rulings such as Shiv Sarup Gupta vs Mahesh Chand Gupta (1999) and Baldev Singh Bajwa vs Monish Saini (2005), the court reaffirmed that a landlord’s need must be genuine and honestly felt, not a mere whim, but once that genuineness is established, courts should not second-guess a landlord’s choice between multiple properties they own.
By the time the Supreme Court delivered its verdict, both original parties to the dispute, Kamla Devi and Thakar Dass, had died, with their legal heirs carrying the case forward in their names.
The court has now directed that the tenant’s heirs hand over vacant and peaceful possession of the shop within two months, finally closing the case.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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