S.152 of the Civil Procedure Code grants the court the power to correct clerical errors in judgments, decrees, or orders, or errors arising therein from any accidental slip or omission.

1. This revision is by the plaintiff and is directed against an order of the court below rejecting his application for correction of certain mistakes which had crept in the description of the property as scheduled to the plaint and so later in the decree.

2. According to the plaintiff the plaint schedule was correct in so far as it related to survey number, the acreage, the pakuthy and muri. The boundaries alone had been wrongly described but this wrong description did not in any way affect the identity of the property. This property along with others were the subject of a hypothecation bond in favour of the plaintiff's father and a decree in O.S. 6 of 1106 had been obtained thereon and sale and delivery in execution had since then followed. The mistake in the boundaries, it was alleged by the plaintiff, arose by the adoption for purpose of the plaint in this suit, of the boundaries of the just previous item 19 covered by the decree on the hypothecation bond. The defendant-respondent had duly paid the pattern reserved under the lease deed in respect of the property. He had also submitted to the decree in the case for recovery on the basis of the lease and since then been paying the rents in due course until his default which led to his loss of the concession under Act 8 of 1950 Indeed it was only when the Amin filed his report about the mistake that plaintiff became aware of it. The court below did not post the plaintiff's application for evidence to ascertain how far his case as to identity of property was made out, but it assumed and it is conceded before me on behalf of the defendant, incorrectly, that in allowing the plaintiff's petition for correction there will arise without question, the substitution of an entirely different property. Learned counsel for the respondent however says that even on the allegations of the plaintiff the petition is not sustainable.

3. The only question therefore which arises for consideration is whether on the facts alleged by the plaintiff he is entitled to invoke the jurisdiction of the court to have the correction made. Now obviously the section of the Civil Procedure Code which is appealed to, is S.152.

That section says:

S. 152. Clerical or arithmetical mistakes in judgments, decrees or orders or errors arising therein from any accidental slip or omission may at any time be corrected by the Court either of its own motion or on the application of any of the parties."

The question how far a court can under S.152 amend clerical errors in a decree although the error may have first occurred in the parties' pleadings and may have been merely copied from them in the decree has been the subject of some diversity of judicial opinion. The language of the section does not exclude such mistakes and there would appear to be no reason for restricting the scope of the section as some courts have held, to correction of errors made by the court itself. Indeed mistakes having their origin anterior to the suit and repeated in the decree have themselves been corrected by exercise of jurisdiction under this section. Thus when there is an error in the description of mortgaged property owing to the accidental use of the word 'west' for 'east' Rahulghani v. Uma Shenkar, A.I.R. 1944 Oudh 5 or the insertion of wrong survey number Satyanarayana v. Purnayya, A.I.R. 1931 Mad. 260 and the error is repeated in the plaint and the decree, the court has been held to have ample powers to rectify the error. As Pandalai, J. observed in the Madras case just cited:

"There is nothing which limits the power of the court under S.152 to correcting errors, mistakes and omissions, which arise in the suit. Nothing prevents the court from doing justice in an appropriate case where such mistakes arose by reason of copying an erroneous document into the plaint. A suit for rectification of the instrument and decree is not the only remedy; an application for review may be appropriate, but that is no obstacle under S.152 to an appli