Judgment

KRISHNA IYER, J.:- The short point of law decided in the long judgment under appeal may justly be given short shrift. But the batch of Civil Revision Petitions allowed by the High Court involves a legal issue of deep import from the angle of agrarian reform and surplus land available for distribution under its scheme that we deem it proper to discuss the core question at some length. If the statutory construction which found favour with the High Court be correct the risk of reform legislation being condemned to functional futility is great, and so the State has come up in appeal by Special Leave challenging the High Courts interpretation of Section 22 of the Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Act, 1961 (for short, the Ceiling Act). Presently, we will set out the skeletal facts relating to the civil appeals and the scheme of the Act designed for distributive justice in the field of agricultural land ownership, sufficient to disclose the purpose of the legislation, the mischief it intends to suppress, the reverse effect of the construction put on the key section (S. 22) in the Judgment under appeal and the consequent stultification of the objective of the