Application for amendment of the plaint by minor after attaining majority if can be allowed.

This is a petition by One Kaliammal, the defendant in O. S. No. 395/52 on the file of the sub-Court, Coimbatore, against the order of the learned Subordinate Judge in I.A. 515/55 allowing the 2nd plaintiff the respondent herein to amend the plaint drastically on attaining majority, on the ground that the amendments involved only questions of law, and were in his opinion, fit to be allowed. I have perused the entire records and heard the learned counsel on both sides. Mr. Rajaraman learned counsel for the petitioner, urged that even questions of law net raised in the original plaint should not be allowed to be raised by way of amendment, if they would totally change the cause of action or subvert the frame of the original plaint, or set up contentions which were already known to the parties at the time of filing the original plaint but were not set up then. I agree generally with these propositions. But in this case there is the fact that the 2nd plaintiff was a minor at the time of the filing of the original plaint and was represented by a guardian. Under our law, there is a right in a minor to attack the guardian’s acts in conducting a suit on the ground of gross negligence and to get any decree passed in such a suit set aside on proof of such negligence. A bench of this Court, to which I too was a party has recently held that such right of a minor extends even to execution proceedings and appeals and indeed even to the negligence of a guardian in not filing an appeal where one was obviously called for. So it is clear that a minor plaintiff, when he attains majority must be given an opportunity of making even drastic amendments to a plaint according to what he considers ought to have been the correct and relevant allegations, for at the moment when he attains majority he takes the responsibility for his actions. At that moment naturally he is given such liberty. On that ground I uphold the lower Court’s order allowing the amendment, and dismiss this Civil Revision Petition but in the circumstances without costs.

V.S. ------------- Petition dismissed.