The notice under Section 138 of the N.I. Act must be issued within 30 days of receiving information about the dishonor of the cheque; failure to comply renders the complaint non-maintainable.

JUDGMENT :

Rakesh Kainthla, J.

The petitioner has filed the present petition for quashing of complaint No. 193 of 2022, titled Sandeep Kumar vs. Naresh Kumar pending in the Court of learned Judicial Magistrate, First Class, Chopal, District Shimla, H.P. (learned Trial Court) (Parties shall hereinafter be referred to in the same manner as they were arrayed before the learned Trial Court for convenience).

2. Briefly stated, the facts giving rise to the present petition are that the complainant filed a complaint under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act ( in short N.I.Act) before the learned Trial Court to take action against the accused. It was asserted that accused No.1 Naresh Kumar represented to the complainant that he was a Director of accused No. 2 M/s NTS Online Services OPC Pvt. Ltd. The complainant agreed to online business through the accused. The complainant found subsequently that customers were not being provided with the required services. The complainant asked the accused to render the accounts and the accused admitted his liability to pay an amount of Rs.53,999/-. The accused issued a cheque of Rs.53,999/- in the discharge of his legal liability, which was dishonoured with the remarks ‘account closed’. This intimation was received by the complainant on 29.08.2022. The complainant issued a demand notice on 29.09.2022 asking the accused to make the payment within 30 days of receipt of the notice, however, the accused failed to do so. Hence, a complaint was filed before the learned Trial Court.

3. Being aggrieved from the filing of the complaint, the accused No.1/petitioner filed the present petition asserting the cheque was presented beyond 30 days provided under Section 138(b) of N.I. Act and the essential requirement of Section 138 of N.I. Act was not satisfied, therefore, it was prayed that the present petition be allowed and the complaint filed by the respondent/complainant before the learned Trial Court be quashed.

4. Notice of the petition was issued to the respondent but none appeared on behalf of the respondent despite service.

5. I have heard Mr. T.K. Verma, learned counsel for accused No.1/petitioner. He submitted that complaint shows that the check returning memo was received on 29.08.2022 and the legal notice was issued on 29.09.2022. Section 138(b) of N.I. Act provides 30 days for issuing the notice. The notice was issued beyond the period of 30 days, which is a violation of Section 138 of N.I.Act. Therefore, he prayed that the present petition be allowed and the complaint be quashed.

6. I have given considerable thought to the submission made at the bar and have gone through the records carefully.

7. The law relating to quashing criminal cases was explained by the Hon’ble Supreme Court in B.N. John v. State of U.P., 2025 SCC OnLine SC 7 as under: -

“7. As far as the quashing of criminal cases is concerned, it is now more or less well settled as regards the principles to be applied by the court. In this regard, one may refer to the decision of this Court in State of Haryana v. Ch. Bhajan Lal, 1992 Supp (1) SCC 335, wherein this Court has summarized some of the principles under which FIR/complaints/criminal cases could be quashed in the following words:

“102. In the backdrop of the interpretation of the various relevant provisions of the Code under Chapter XIV and of the principles of law enunciated by this Court in a series of decisions relating to the exercise of the extraordinary power under Article 226 or the inherent powers under Section 482 of the Code which we have extracted and reproduced above, we give the following categories of cases by way of illustration wherein such power could be exercised either to prevent abuse of the process of any court or otherwise to secure the ends of justice, though it may not be possible to lay down any precise, clearly defined and sufficiently channelised and inflexible guidelines or rigid formulae and to give an exhaustive list of myriad kinds of cases wherein s