The Chief Justice.-The applicant was assessed to income-tax by the Income-tax Officer, Cuddalore circle, South Arcot district, by his order dated 4th February, 1948. He filed an application before the Commissioner of Income-tax under section 33-A(2) of the Act for revision of this order dated 18th February, 1949. The application was rejected in limine by the Commissioner on the ground that the revision petition was barred by time. According to the petitioner, the order sought to be revised was received by him only on 24th February, 1948. He has filed this application for the issue of a writ of mandamus to the Commissioner of Income-tax, Madras, directing him to entertain his application and to dispose of it in accordance with law, because according to him the application was within time as it was filed within one year from the date of the receipt of the assessment order by him.

The only question on the merits which falls for decision is whether the one year has to be computed from the date when the order was signed by the Income-tax Officer, or the date when it was communicated to the petitioner, or the date, if there be any, on which the petitioner had the opportunity of coming to know of the order. The learned advocate for the petitioner relied on a catena of decisions of this Court of which it is sufficient to refer to two, namely, Secretary of State for India in Council v. Gopisetti Narayanaswami Naidu Garu1 and Swaminathan v. Letchmanan2 which support his contention that the date of the order does not mean the date when the officer passed the order but the date when such order was either communicated to the party or the date when it was pronounced or published in such a manner that the party must be deemed to have had notice of it or the date of such pronouncement or publication. The learned Judges in Secretary of State for India in Council v. Gopisetti Narayanaswami Naidu Garu1, were no doubt faced with the difficulty of straining the language which prima facie does not import a date different from the date when the order is actually passed. In Firm of Mohan Lal v. Commissioner of Income-tax, Bihar and Orissa 3 , a Bench of the Patna High Court, without referring to the decisions of this Court, arrived at a conclusion which undoubtedly is supported by the prima facie meaning of the language used in the statute. We see no reason to disregard the consistent course of authority in this Court on this point.

Mr. Rama Rao Sahib, learned counsel for the Income-tax Department, contended that the rule laid down in the two Madras decisions above cited is not an invariable and inflexible rule applying to the provisions relating to appeals and revisions made in every enactment, and that each such provision in a particular enactment should be construed having regard to the general scheme of that enactment and taking into account the history of legislation in respect of the subject-matter of that enactment.‘He placed strong reliance on the fact that there had been amendments of the Income-tax Act and with regard to certain rights of appeal the amendments had specifically provided that time should be computed from the date of the receipt of the order sought to be appealed against, but there was no such amendment introduced in section 33-A. It is not for us to consider why the language of section 33-A(2) was not altered. The only question which we have to decide is whether there is anything in the reasoning of the learned Judges in Secretary of State for India in Council v. Gopisetti Narayanaswami Naidu Garu1 and Swaminathan v. Letchmanan2, which makes the application of the rule laid down by them dependent on the provisions of a particular statute. We think there is none. On the other hand, we consider that the rule laid down by the learned Judges in the above two decisions-and we are taking the same view-is based upon a salutary and just principle, namely, that if a person is given a right to resort to the remedy to get rid of an advers

Click Here to Read the rest of this document