Judgment

KRISHNA IYER, J.:- This is a pedestrian appeal by a land-owner whose property, having been acquired compulsorily by the State, asks for more compensation, probably appetised by increases over the Collector s award granted by the City Civil Court and the High Court. The grounds urged are conventional, based on comparison of prices shown in land Sales in the neighbourhood and the general escalation of urban land values in the country.

2. 127 odd grounds (a ground is around 5 1/2 cents; actually 2,400 sq. ft) were acquired in 1959 for the construction of a Housing Colony for the Madras Port Trust employers by the then Madras State. They comprise R.S. No. 4032/1 and other items with which we are not concerned, since the owners of those items have not come up in appeal to this Court. The relevant notification under S. 4 (1) was made on August 12, 1959 and so the compensation has to be pegged to the market value as on that date. Of course, 16 years have rolled by since, thanks to delay which has come to stay in the administrative and forensic processes of our land. That is by the way. The Land Acquisition Officer awarded Rs. 800/- per ground. The City Civil Court, approaching the problem of valuation plot-wise, as for a housing colony, made the necessary deductions involved in that process and awarded at the rate of Rs. 1,000/per ground. The High Court, on appeal, made an upward revision, discarding the trial court s approach and awarded Rs. 1,800/- per ground. The State has not come up in appeal, but the unquenched claimant asks for more in appeal, demanding, at least Rs. 2,200/- per ground.

3. Generally speaking, a cardinal component in the escalation of prices of urban realty which does not find sufficient expression in the ancient Land Acquisition Act, 1894, is the developmental operations inevitable in a rapidly industrialising society for which the individual owner makes no social contribution. Be that as it may, courts have to apply the legislation as extant, it being left to the law-makers to harmonize social justice with individual rights by appropriate reforms. We have to proceed to determine the compensation according to the canons crystallized in S. 23 of the Act.

4. At the outset, we must warn ourselves of the broad guideline that in an appeal from an award granting compensation this Court will not interfere unless there is something to show not merely that on the balance of evidence it is possible to reach a different conclusion but that the judgment cannot be supported by reason of a wrong application of principle or because some important point affecting valuation has been overlooked or misapplied. Moreover, there is a prudent condition to which the appellate power, generally speaking, is subject. A court of appeal interferes not when the judgment under attack is not right but only, when it is shown to be wrong. These twin principles serve as backdrop to our approach to the rival contentions in the case.

5. It is true that compensation for compulsory acquisition, as governed by Section 23, gives high priority to the market value of the land at the date of the publication of the notification under S. 4, sub-s. (1). But what is market value? It is a common place of this branch of jurisprudence that the main criterion is what a willing purchaser would pay a willing vendor. Ordinarily a party will be entitled to get the amount that he actually and willingly paid for a particular property, provided the transaction be bond fide and entered into with due regard to the prevalent market conditions and is proximate in time to the relevant date under S. 23. We may even say that the best evidence of the value of property is the sale of the very property to which the claimant is a party. If the sale is of recent date, then all that need normally be proved is that the sale was between a willing purchaser and a willing seller, that there has not been any appreciable rise or fall since and that nothing has been done on the lan