Pius C. Kuriakose, J.

The grievance of the appellant is that the Land Acquisition Officer dismissed the application under S.28A filed by him on the ground that his property is registered as other dry lands while the property which is subject matter of the judgment relied on in the application stood registered in the revenue records as garden land. Upon his application, the Land Acquisition Officer made a reference under S.28A(3) to theCourt. The Court permitted the parties to adduce evidence. A Commissioner was deputed and he filed a report which indicates that appellant's land was a land planted with cashew trees and the trees were not high yielding ones. In other words the Court took the view that the lands covered by the judgment relied on by the appellant and the appellant's own land are not similar.

2. It is transparently clear from the award of the officer and from the award of the Court that the appellant's property and the property which was the subject matter of the court judgment relied on by the appellant were acquired under the very same 4(1) notification. But, of course it is not clear from the judgment as to what was the rate awarded by the officer originally to the appellant and to the party in the judgment which was relied on, Sri.O.Ramachandran Nambiar. the learned counsel for the appellant submitted that it is not necessary that the awarding officer should have given same rate to the applicant in an application under S.28A and to the party in the judgment relied on in the said application. The learned Government Pleader submits that the objective behind under S.28A is to give equal justice to those who were treated equally by the Land Acquisition Officer; in the matter of land value.

3. The argument of the learned Government Pleader has got some first blush attraction. Even then, the plain language of S.28A in my view will not support the acceptance of such an argument. S.28A reads as follows:

28A, Redetermination of the amount of compensation on the basis of the award of the Court:-

(1) Where in an award under this Part, the Court allows to the applicant any amount of compensation in excess of the amount awarded by the Collector under S.11, the persons interested in all the other land covered by the same notification under S.4, sub-s.(1) and who are also aggrieved by the award of the Collector may, notwithstanding that they had not made an application to the Collector under S.18, by written application to the Collector within three months from the date of the award of the Court require that the amount of compensation payable to them may be re-determined on the basis of the amount of compensation awarded by the Court:

4. To endorse the view of the Land Acquisition Officer and the Reference Court in this case will be to ignore legislative object underlying S.28A. These are times when extensive areas of lands are acquired for major projects and the Land Acquisition Officer invariably has to categorise the lands covered by S.4(1) notification relating to the acquisition scheme on the basis of the relative importance and advantages of the lands involved. Usually categorisation is done on the basis of main road frontage, nature of land (wet or dry), frontage of some other roads, no road frontage at all etc. Different values will be awarded to lands corning under different categories. If S.28A has to be understood as done by the Land Acquisition Officer and the Reference Court, the properties of the concerned applicant and the party in the court judgment relied on should come under the same category as per the award. But, it is an undeniable reality that there will be a certain correlation between the values of different types of land situated within a given local area which means that at least to a certain extent finding by a competent court that value of land in category No.l is more than what was given by the officer originally will justify a finding that value of other categories of land will also be more