Judgment

KRISHNA IYER, J. - Delhi, the home of Power and the nidus of paradoxes, presents many pathological problems to the students of history, social science, politics and law, often interacting with each other. We are here concerned with the socio-legal malady of accommodation scarcity and the syndrome of long queues of government employees waiting, not knowing for how long, for allotment of government quarters at moderate rents and the co-existence of several well-to-do officers enjoying, by virtue of their office, State-allowed residential accommodation while owning their own but letting them out at lucrative rents, making substantial incomes in the bargain. The law awoke to end this unhappy development and to help the helpless nonallottees get government accommodation. Such is the back-drop to Section 14A which, read along with Section 25B, of the Delhi Rent Control Act, 1958 (Act LIX of 1958) (for short, the Act), falls for our consideration in the present appeal by special leave.

2. A deeper understanding of the need for the new provisions just mentioned and the construction that they bear in the context necessitates stating a little more in detail the social setting. The seat of the capital of a vast country with varied activities naturally will be honeycombed with government offices, public organisations and growing armies of employees. The higher echelons in public service, over the decades, have made generous use of the availability of government lands at low prices and of the know-how of utilising, to their advantage, the immense developmental potential in the years ahead if buildings were constructed with foresight. Thus many neatly organised colonies blossomed all around Delhi whose owners were in many instances officers who had the telescopic faculty to see the prospective spreadout of Delhi of the future. Taking time by the forelock they wisely invested money (often on soft loans from Government) in buildings which secured ambitious rents when Indias headquarters did, as it was bound to, explosively expand, Most of such officials let their premises for high rents to big businessmen, foreign establishments, company executives and others of their like.

3. Where did the officers themselves reside? The strange advantage of Delhi is that houses, with lawns, servants quarters and other amenities, built by government long years back are allotted to government servants on rents which are a fraction of what similar accommodation in the private sector may fetch. Oftentimes the bigger officials, according to the hierarchical system (almost perfected into some sort of officials castes and sub-castes based on status and position in the ministries and not on the needs of their families or office) occupied the classified quarters, the officials brahmins, of course, getting the best. The rents they paid as tenants were negligible compared to the returns they made as landlords. Indeed, a sociological research into the whole system may perhaps unravel the semi-survival of quasi-feudal life-styles and the unlovely phenomenon of public servants paying little and collecting large.

4. The socio-economic sequel was worse than this. An astronomical increase in the number of government servants led to a terrific pressure for accommodation because, most of them-particularly at the lesser levels - had no worthwhile salaries and were priced out of the private sector where rentals had unconscionably rocketed. This rack-renting abuse can be checked, in some measure, by an activist policy of relentlessly enforcing fair rents through penal tags. That, of course, depends on the will and wisdom of Parliament and Government, and the court may not, make any comment. Anyway, currently, controls in this essential area of human accommodation, in the capital city of our socialist republic, are a statute-book virtue. Similarly, the suggestion, made by counsel for the appellants, that the true solution is for the State to build more accommodation for its