Judgment

KRISHNA IYER, J.:- Nationalisation of the road transport service is of strategic significance to the countrys development and new legal issues arises as private operators, threatened with elimination, battle against such schemes. One such obstacle to the proposes nationalisation of the route Nellore-Ramapuram by the Andhra Pradesh Government is the subject-matter of this appeal by certificate, the High Court having considered it substantial and novel enough to qualify under Art. 133 of the Constitution. The point raised is short, the order under appeal brief but the problem is thorny, with extra-territorial overtones and anomalies in application. Can a route, whose termini lie within the same State but which traverses in its course one or more other States, be designated an inter-State route? If yes, then the exercise in nationalisation proposed by the respondent State cannot materrialise into an approved scheme unless, as desiderated by the proviso to Section 68-D (3) of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1939 (hereinafter referred to as M. V. Act), the previous approval of the Central Government is secured. Here, admittedly, no such approval has been obtained and the notified route does pass over a short distance of about 8 km., through Tamil Nadu. The route Nellore-Ramapuram was, according to counsel for the existing private operator, an inter-State route and non-compliance with S. 68-D (3) of M. V. Act aborted the nationalisation. The counter-submission by the State which appealed to the High Court was that the decisive test turned on whether both the termini fell within the same State as it did in this case, and so no question of inter-State route arose.

2. At the first flush, an inter-State route may be of two categories, either connecting two States or traversing two or more States. Blacks Legal Dictionary considers inter-State to mean Between two or more States; between places or persons in different States; concerning or affecting two or more States politically or territorially. And that accords with commonsense. The termini test as presented by counsel for the State, may lead to strange results, fatal to federal ideas. A route which originates in Srinagar, runs down South to Kanya Kumari and rises North to end again in Kashmir, completing a Bharath-darshan, cannot sensibly be called an intra-State one, without doing gross violence to language, geography and federalisam. And in the absence of a statutory definition of inter-State route, non-violence to English and conformance to commonsense dictate the adoption of the conventional meaning that if a route traverses more than one State it is inter-State.

3. The statutory sensitivity to one State permitting stage carriages from within its territory into another is reflected in Ss. 63 (1) and (4), 68-D (3) proviso and S. 20 of the Road Transport Corporation Act, 1950. We are skirting the constitutional question of extra-territorial powers but are confining ourselves to a mere interpretation of the provisions of the Act. Route is defined in S. 2 (28-A) to mean a line of travel which specifies the highway which may be traversed by a motor vehicle between one terminus and another. The point is that it is not a notional line as the crow flies but the actual highway as a motor vehicle travels from one terminus to another. The inference is inevitable that a route is transformed into an inter-State one, if the highway it covers passes through more than one State.

4. This easy break through is seemingly obstructed by two rulings of this Court relied on by counsel for the State, although the High Court while granting the certificate, felt that these decisions did not really cover the case on hand.

5. Khazan Singh, (1974) 2 SCR 562 dealt with a case where the termini of the concerned routes were located in different States and so, by any test, were inter-State routes. There, in passing and not as ratio of the case, an observation fell from the Court :

"An inter-State route is one of which