Judgment

S.B. Majmudar, J.-Leave granted.

2. All these three appeals arising from a common judgment rendered by the High Court of Judicature at Allahabad in three writ petitions project a short question whether the common appellant, original writ petitioner, was liable to pay octroi duty during the relevant period from 1980 to 1987 to the respondent-Municipalities on the weight of the glass bottles which were brought within the municipal limits when they were containing soft drinks like Gold Spot, Limca, Thumps-up, Soda, Rim-Zim etc. For the sake of convenience, we shall refer to the appellant as the writ petitioner and the respondents as the respond­ent-Municipalities in the latter part of the judgment. The contention of the writ petitioner was that the beverages in liquid form were imported by the wholesalers to whom the soft drinks were sold. The Municipalities, therefore, could validly impose octroi on the weight of liquid contents of the bottles and not on the weight of bottles which were mere containers as these bottles after taking out the liquid contained therein were being sent back in their empty state to the writ petitioner by the wholesalers for re-cycling and thus these