RAMAN NAYAR, C. J. :-The Kerala Land Reforms Act, 1963 (Act 1 of 1964) as originally enacted (the original Act as we shall call it) finds a place in the Ninth Schedule to the Constitution -see Item 39 -and therefore

has the protection of Article 31-B. It has been amended three times, first by Act 12 of 1966, then by Act 9 of 1967, and now by Act 35 of 1969, the amendments made by the last mentioned Act (which we shall call the amending Act) being far-reaching. (To the 132 sections in the original Act, over 50 new sections have been added while over 60 sections have been amended. To the 62 definitions 10 have been added while 20 have been amended. The amended Act is therefore virtually a new piece of legislation). The first of these was enacted by the President while the remaining two have received his assent -it has been contended not in the free and proper exercise of his judgment, but, of course, we cannot go into that -but none of them has been included in the Ninth Schedule. Therefore, such of the provisions of the amended Act (or simply, the Act) as are not part of the original Act (whether they be entirely new provisions or provisions in substitution) cannot claim the protection

of Article 31-B see Ramanlal v. State of Gujarat, AIR 1969 SC 168 and State of Orissa v. Chandrasekhar Singh Bhoi, 1970-1 SCWR 306 : (AIR 1970 SC 398). The petitioners in these forty applications under Article 226 of the Constitution are land-holders, and, between them, they assail virtually all the material provisions of the amended Act as violative of Articles 14, 19, 25, 26 and 31 of the Constitution -many of them seek the striking down of the Act in entirety on that score. The principal, indeed almost the sole, defence is that the provisions are protected from such attack by Article 31-A.

2. The contesting respondents are the State of Kerala and the Land Board constituted under Section 100 of the Act which has been made a party respondent to some of the petitions. In a few petitions, persons likely to claim the benefits of the Act have been made party respondents but in a large number they have not, possibly because it is difficult to postulate who they are and what their claims will be. However, general notice of these petitions inviting all persons interested to intervene at the hearing has been given by advertisement in five Malayalam dailies having a wide circulation throughout the State, but no one has addressed us pursuant thereto although ten persons did obtain leave to intervene.

3. Many of the petitions assail numerous provisions of the Act without disclosing how the petitioners are affected thereby. It is said that the purpose is to make out that the Act as a whole is bad. But it is well settled that only those who are personally and directly affected by the impugned provisions of a statute are entitled to challenge their constitutionality. A person who is aggrieved by one provision of a statute cannot be heard to challenge another by which he is not aggrieved even if the two be inseverable -that is by no means the case here -so that the striking down of the provision by which he is not aggrieved might have the result of making the provision by which he is aggrieved of no avail. Moreover, it seems to us that the strict doctrine of what might be called, bad in part bad in whole, of Romesh Thapper v. State of Madras, AIR 1950 SC 124 is but of rare application. In most cases it would be possible to save the statute to the extent it is within the constitutionally permissible limits by limiting its operation to those limits either by applying the principle of severability in application expounded in State of Bombay v. United Motors Ltd., AIR 1953 SC 252 and in R. M. D. C. v. Union of India, AIR 1957 SC 628 or, as was done in In re Hindu Women's Rights to Property Act, AIR 1941 FC 72 by adopting the device of construing the apparently wide language of the statute in a restricted sense so as to keep it within bounds. It is true that i