( 1. ) THIS application under Article 226 of the Constitution of India is by a partner of a firm registered under the Indian Partnership Act which is engaged in the business of manufacture of biscuits and confectionary.

( 2. ) THE petitioners manufactory at Gwalior has been licensed under the Factories Act as a factory employing not more than five-hundred workers on any one day during the year. According to the applicant, the number of workers in the factory has never been less than 320 and at one time it went up to 477. The grievance of the petitioner is that during the pendency of certain disputes raised by the firm and also by the union of the workers and referred to the Industrial Tribunal under Section 10 (1) of the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, for adjudication, the State Government issued a notification under Section 2 (4) of the Bombay Industrial Relations Act, 1946, as adapted by the Madhya Bharat Industrial Relations (Adaptation) Act, Samvat 2006, applying all the provisions of the B. I. R. Act "to those undertakings of the biscuit and confectionary industry in the Madhya Bharat region who employ more than hundred workers from the date of the publication of the notification". The petitioner says that the application of the B. I. R, Act (hereinafter referred to as the Act) to the undertakings mentioned in the said notification has the effect of repealing the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, and of putting an end to the references pending before the Industrial Tribunal, and that thus the settlement of disputes pending for adjudication before the Industrial Tribunal has been postponed and prolonged much to the detriment of industrial peace in his factory. For this reason the petitioner challenges the validity and constitutionality of the notification on various grounds and prays that the notification be declared void and inoperative and that a suitable writ requiring the State to cancel the notification and restraining it from proceeding "in any manner in pursuance of the said notification" be issued.

( 3. ) IN the petition the validity of the notification has been questioned on several grounds. But before us Shri Puttulal Dubey, learned counsel for the applicant, attacked the validity of the notification only on one ground, namely, that it violated Article 14 of the Constitution in that by the notification the Act was applied riot to all the undertakings of the biscuit and confectionary industry but only to those "who employ more than hundred workers from the date of the publication of the notification" and there was thus an unreasonable and arbitrary classification between undertakings employing less than hundred workers and those employing more than hundred workers for the purposes of the applicability of the Act.

( 4. ) IN our judgment, the notification in question is not vulnerable to the objection put forward by the learned counsel for the petitioner. The principles by which the validity of the notification must be tested, as laid down in repeated decisions of the Supreme Court, are these: While Article 14 of the Constitution forbids class legislation, it does not prohibit a reasonable classification for purposes of legislation. In order to pass the test of permissible classi fication, the two conditions that must be satisfied are that the classification must be founded on an intelligible differentia which distinguishes persons Or things that are grouped together from others left out of the group and the differentia must have a rational relation to the object sought to be achieved by the statute in question. The classification may be founded on different bases such as geographical, or according to objects or occupation and the like. The decisions of the Supreme Court further lay down that there is a presumption in favour of the constitutionality of an enactment and the burden is upon the person challenging the validity to show that there has been a clear violation of the constitutional guarantee and that it