Acquisition of land for providing house sites to homeless harijans.

This writ petition is filed by the petitioners who are the owners of lands in R.S. No. 561/5 in Poosaripalayam, hamlet of V. Pudhur village in Villupuram Taluk. The State of Madras represented by the Special Tahsildar, Land Acquisition (Harijan Welfare), is the respondent. A notification under section 4 (1), relating to the acquisition of the above lands under the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act, was published on 2nd September, 1964, in the Fort St. George Gazette. Since the matter was one of urgency, it was also indicated in the notification that the enquiry under section 5-A of the Act would be dispensed with. It was made clear in the counter affidavit supplied by the Government in this Writ Petition that the urgency in the present case arose because the existing Harijan colony consists of 47 families, that out of them 16 families were houseless, that there are 21 families who lived in low lying fields subject to inundation during rainy season, and consequently it was necessary to acquire the above land by resort to the urgency clause for the provision of house sites to 37 harijan families. This is what is now stated in the counter affidavit of the Government. Thereafter a declaration under section 6 of the Act was published on nth November, 1964. The counter affidavit of the respondent also stated that public notice of the section 4 (1) notification as required in that section was also given by beat of torn torn and by affixture in the Mariamman Temple. The petitioners have filed this writ petition under Article 226 of the Constitution seeking for the issue of a writ of mandamus restraining the respondent from proceeding further with the acquisition.

The principal grounds urged by the learned Counsel for the petitioners in support of the relief are the following: It is urged in the first place that the resort to the urgency clause was not justified at all in the circumstances of the present case. This objection is pointless because of the specific averment in the counter affidavit of the respondent to which I have already made reference. That clearly indicates that the existing facilities for residence of the Harijans in the village are totally inadequate and that 16 families are left without houses, and 21 families have facilities to live only in a land inundated with water during rains. This cannot be considered to be a case where the Government, for the purpose of reaching its subjective satisfaction about the existence of urgency, proceeded on no ground at all or on grounds which could be demonstrably established to be irrelevant. In a recent decision reported in Raja Anand Brahma Sah v. The State of Uttar Pradesh1, the Supreme Court dealt with a case where the circumstances clearly indicated that the State Government never applied its mind at all to the matter of urgency. In that case, the land in question under acquisition was actually neither waste or arable land. In such circumstances, it was found that the State Government could not in any view of the matter apply the urgency clause under section 17 (4) which requires as a pre-requisite that the land should be arable or waste. But here the facts are entirely different. The circumstances referred to in the counter affidavit are sufficient from which the Government could form an opinion about the urgency.

The second argument was that individual notice was not given to the petitioner under section 4 (1) of the Act. Reference was made to the Board’s Standing Orders 92, paragraph 7 as well as paragraph 9. Paragraph 7 starts with the remark that the publication of a notification under section 4 (1) of the Act is not only a preliminary to entry on the land, but also a necessity in every case as it is a legal notice to persons interested that they may prefer objections to the proposed acquisition. The statement thus found in the Board’s Standing Order is not authority for deducing that individual notice to the persons interested in the land proposed to be acqu