New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday granted relief to landowners in Maharashtra who were affected by a 2018 Bombay High Court ruling that allowed the state government to categorise plots across Mumbai as “private forests” and take them over.
A division bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Prasanna B. Varale set aside the 2018 decision, which ignored existing judicial precedent laid down by the top court, saying Article 144 of the Constitution obliges all civil and judicial authorities to act and aid the top court, and its provisions are not ceremonial recitals but “structural guarantees”.
The court recalled that the issue had already been resolved by a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court in the 2014 Godrej & Boyce vs State of Maharashtra case. It said that the legal position on the matter is “officially settled”.
“When a judgment minimizes a binding ratio, ignores missing statutory steps, and seeks to distinguish on immaterial facts, it creates an appearance of a reluctance to accept precedent. Such an approach conveys a measure of pettiness that is inconsistent with the detachment that judicial reasoning demands. In our view this is an unfortunate departure from the discipline of stare decisis,” the court noted in its 40-page ruling.
‘Stare decisis’ refers to the doctrine that courts will stick to precedent or previous court rulings in making their decisions on a closely related issue. The term originates from the Latin word for “to stand by things decided”.
The court was acting on a batch of 96 pleas filed by landowners, challenging the Bombay HC’s July 2018 ruling, which refused to interfere with the revenue mutations or the process of updating official property ownership records.
The Bombay HC said the Maharashtra government in 1960 issued notices to landowners designating certain plots in the state as “private forests” under Section 35(3) of the Indian Forest Act (IFA), 1927.
This allowed state governments to regulate or prohibit in any forest or wasteland, activities like clearing land for cultivation or feeding cattle; firing or clearing vegetation; or maintaining water supply, roads and bridges.
The Act specifies that no work can begin until a notice is issued to the owner, which designates a particular land as forest land. After such a notice is issued, the landowner can show cause or raise objections to the same. Following this, a state government-designated officer hears these objections and decides on the issue.
In its judgment, the HC rejected the landowners’ pleas, holding that the state’s 1960 notices for acquiring private land were a sufficient basis for land acquisition, and refused to interfere with the government documents that classified these lands as private forests.
What SC ruled
The Supreme Court said the matter had been resolved by the 2014 ruling, which overturned a 2008 HC order, which upheld the actions of the Maharashtra government, by way of a three-judge bench decision authored by Justice Madan Lokur.
The court also made it clear that for any private land to be vested as a “private forest” under the state government’s control, Section 35(3) of the 1927 Act says that a notice should not just be issued but also served upon the landholder.
The court said that serving a notice alone triggers an owner’s right to object, adding that it is only then that the landholder can decide what objections to file, before a final decision is taken.
Pointing to the fact that many of these so-called notices could not even be furnished by the state as evidence in the present case, the court noted, “There is no proof of service of any Section 35(3) notice of the IFA on the then owners… Actual possession has at all times remained with private owners and this position is reflected in the revenue records that describe them as occupants.”
The bench noted that the Maharashtra government had not taken possession of the land was taken by the Maharashtra government and neither was any compensation exercise carried out as prescribed in the statute.
It said the Maharashtra government had produced “undated and unverified possession papers”, which did not inspire confidence. In one case, the government had relied on a notice addressed to someone who wasn’t even the owner on the relevant date.
“A nineteenth century notification, invoked for the first time at the appellate stage to suggest linkage with a reserved forest, was not the foundation of the impugned mutations and cannot be used to improve the case now,” the court noted.
It also relied on Article 300 of the Constitution, which says that no person is deprived of property save by authority of law.
Dubbing the Bombay HC ruling as an attempt to avoid binding precedent, the court said that judicial discipline required faithful application of the law by the Supreme Court, as enshrined under Article 144.
What is a ‘private forest’?
The state-specific Maharashtra Private Forests Acquisition Act, 1975, defines a private forest as “any forest which is not the property of Government” and includes any land declared to be a “forest” on 30 August 1975, the day the act was passed.
The Act also included lands the state government was interested in “jointly”, along with other persons, under this definition of “private forests”.
While the 1975 law applies only to Maharashtra, the 1927 central law is a broader, all-encompassing legislation covering the entire country.
The Maharashtra Act defined forests in broad terms to mean a tract of land covered with trees, shrubs, bushes or woody vegetation, and existing or being maintained with or without human effort.
Once the control of a land was vested with the state government, no grant, agreement, usage, custom or any decree or order of any court, tribunal or authority or any other document, could stand in its way, Section 3 of the Maharashtra Act said.
How it reached SC
A group of landowners approached the Supreme Court, seeking a declaration that their lands were not private forests under the 1975 Act, and that their rights should be restored.
They also sought quashing or setting aside of the revenue annotations and mutation entries, which described their lands as affected by forest proceedings and being vested in the state.
While the Maharashtra government argued that these notices were issued under Section 35(3) of the central Act, and that the definition of private forests under the Maharashtra law was “inclusive”, the landowners argued that they had not even received these notices, which served as a basis for their acquisition by the state, nor had any inquiry taken place with regard to the objections they had to such acquisition, as the law prescribes.
In 2002, the state authorities went a step further and initiated the administrative exercise of annotating village records to reflect the vesting of such lands in the hands of the state. This opened a floodgate of additional problems, such as sub-registrars refusing to register instruments or not giving due compensation to owners, the plea said.
As a result, many such petitions reached the Supreme Court.
Questioning the legality of these annotations and mutations, the landowners approached the court seeking to quash these entries, and to obtain a declaration from the top court that the lands were privately owned and not “private forests” acquired by the Maharashtra government.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
Also Read: Delhi HC says furlough not an absolute right. A look at the rules of conditional release from jail