JUDGMENT

1. This is an appeal under Section 45, Encumbered Estates Act, passed by the Special Judge, first grade, of Bara Banki. Respondents 1 to 5 made an application under Section 4, Encumbered Estates Act, on 20th October 1936. An order under Section 6 of the Act was passed on 21st October 1936. A written statement on behalf of the applicants was filed on 19th December 1936. Notice under Section 9 of the Act was published in the Gazette dated 20th May 1937. The appellant filed a written statement on 20th August 1937, purporting to be one under Sections 9, 10 and 11 of the Act. He preferred a claim that he was the owner of certain plots and he also alleged that if he was not the owner then he was entitled to recover Rs. 300 from the applicants. Notices under Section 11 were published in the Gazette dated 20th November 1937. The learned civil Judge disallowed the objection of the appellant on the ground that the objection under Section 11 was not made after publication of the notice under that section. The unsuccessful objector filed an appeal in this Court and made the landlords-applicants the opposite parties. The other creditors were not made parties. When the appeal came on for hearing before us, a preliminary objection was taken that the appeal was not maintainable without all the creditors being made parties. We thereupon took action under Section 46, Encumbered Estates Act, and made all the creditors parties. All of them have been served but no objection has been taken by them. We are going to take up this matter under Section 46 of the Act. That section runs thus:

Any Court empowered under Section 45 to hear an appeal under this Act may of its own motion, or on the application of any person concerned, call for the record of proceedings in any case under this Act pending in a Court from which appeals lie to such Court and after giving due notice to the parties concerned pass such orders thereon consistent with the provisions herein contained as it thinks fit, and such order shall be final.

2. This section gives us very wide powers to [interfere with the orders of the lower Courts. We are of opinion that the decision of the learned Judge in this case is quite wrong. Section 11, Clause (2), Encumbered Estates Act, provides:

Any person having any claim to the property mentioned in such notice shall within a period of three months from the date of publication of the notice in the Gazette make an application to the Special Judge stating his claim and the Special Judge shall determine whether the property specified in the claim, or any part thereof, is liable to attachment, sale or mortgage in satisfaction of the debts of the applicant.

3. In our opinion, it is not necessary that the objection be preferred after the publication of the notice. Section 9 of the Act provides that all persons having claims against the applicant should file written statement of their claims within three months from the date of publication of the notice and it was held by a Bench of this Court in Rameshwar Bakhsh Singh v. Govind Prasad, A.I.R. 1941 Oudh 60 that Section 9 enacts provisions fixing the latest date for the filing by the creditors of written statements of their claims and it cannot be said that a written statement filed a few days before the beginning of the date from which the calculation of the last date of limitation was to be made is liable to be treated as not filed within the period of limitation. It was further held that the phrase "within three months from" in Section 9 only prescribes the date of publication of notice as the date by reference to which the last day of limitation is to be calculated and not as prescribing, a kind of compartment of time and enacting that any written statement in order to be presented within time must be presented between the first and the last days of that compartment of time. The principle laid down in this case applies with equal force to the present case. The point which is before us was decide