The judgment establishes the importance of possession on the appointed date and the classification of land as agricultural or punja in determining occupancy rights under the Karnataka Land Reforms Act.

M.F. Saldanha, J.--This appeal which arises out of a proceeding under the Karnataka Land Reforms Act is to some extent illustrative of the reverse position that sometimes emerges in this field of litigation when the Karnataka Land Reforms Act, 1961 was promulgated it was categorised as a Social Welfare Legislation in so far as the object of the Act was, in order to confer permanent protection or in otherwords, to grant occupancy rights which was almost on par with transfer of ownership in respect of agricultural lands that were under cultivation by persons other than owners. From the principle that is incorporated in many of the Land Reforms legislations that have been promulgated from time to time, the spirit of the enactment was that the land should go to the "tiller of the soil" or in other words that the tenant who would have been cultivating agricultural land over a period of time and to whom the protection from its possession was minimal but more importantly who was toiling to raise the produce from the lands and was still required to part with a substantial portion of it in the form of rent, be it in kind or in terms of money, should be given the realistic benefit of enjoying the fruits of the labour. It is undoubtedly a well intended legislation the idea being to raise the status of the agricultural tenant and to provide, as indicated by us earlier, greater level of security and welfare. We cannot however totally overlook the consequences to the person who owned the land who was virtually deprived of the whole of it and to the effect that the looseness with which the provisions of the Act were drafted providing for a lot of scope for thousands of untenable and unjustified claims being put forward. The position gets grossly aggravated when one finds that the jurisdiction under the Act, was conferred on the tribunals specially set up to hear these cases. These tribunals, as has been the sad experience of the High Court, over the last about 3 decades were manned by a set of persons whose qualifications, experience and above all integrity left much to be desired, as a result of which occupancy rights were indiscriminately conferred irrespective of whether the facts and the law justified it in a large number of instances and there was equal trauma on the other side when in thousands of other cases deserving parties did not get justice, essentially because of ignorance or lack of fighting power or more importantly, inability to "satisfy" the tribunals while the initial objective was that it would be desirable to curtail lengthy litigation by barring Advocates, it turned out that in the majority of cases the claims were won by the claimants or vice versa and finally, the situation came to be rectified. One of the aspects that the Courts did find surfacing again and again was the fact that under the provisions of this Act, claims untenable and undeserving claims were preferred for grant of occupancy rights. These claimants invariably succeeded having regard to the fact that the ambit and scope of this Act was very broad and the end result was that the persons who won in the majority of cases were ordinary middle class persons not very different to the owners who ended up totally landless and penniless. The manner in which the orders were passed has also thrown up the other aspect of the law, that in the majority of instances where the claimants have succeeded to a large extent that they were encouraged to carry on with the greedy litigation with the sole object of grabbing whatever little of the land has been left with the owner. These are aspects of the law which require to be restated because while working with the principle of fairness, the concept of doing justice also presupposes the fact that the Court has to take note of the very important principle that there are two parties before the Court and that while doing justice one cannot move entirely in favour of one at the expense of the other.

2. Having made these o