( 1 ) THESE petitions, inter alia, raise a common question as to the circumstances in which leave should be granted to a tenant under sub-section (5) of Section 25b of the Delhi Rent Control Act, 1958 (for short, the Act) Certain subsidiary questions also arise in individual petitions, which are common to some of them.

( 2 ) AS is well-known the Act is a part of the rent control legislation enacted in Delhi, as indeed in the rest of I he country, to deal with an extraordinary situation that arose soon after the outbreak of the Second World War because of increasing pressure on urban immovable property. The situation was further aggravated in the years that followed on account of increasing population explosion and the influx of large number of displaced persons from the territories, now forming part of Pakistan, in the wake of the partition of India and the consequent pressure on land in urban areas. The rent control legislation, throughout the country was intended to strike a reasonable balance between the requirements of the tenants for adequate protection against the aggressive design of greedy landlords to evict the tenants or to increase the rates of rent to an