Judgement

V. R. KRISHNA IYER J.:- These two appeals turn on the construction of Section 19-B of the Punjab Security of Land Tenures Act, (Act X of 1953) (for short, the Act). This legislation was enacted to bring about an agrarian reordering so pivotal to the progress of our rural economy. Haryana, happily a granary of our country, is one of the States where land reform laws are likely to generate great changes by banishing big concentration of Nature s bounty in a few feudal hands, creating an enthusiastic sense of distributive justice and exploiting the productive potential of land by the possessive passion of the landless masses. So strategic is land reform that special constitutional concern has been shown for this programme. Naturally the State enacted the Act whereby ceiling on landownership was set, surplus lands were taken over for settling ejected tenants and others and peasant proprietorship created. The scheme of the Act with which we are concerned is fairly simple and somewhat scientific, although its language, what with frequent amendments dovetailed from time to time, has made for ambiguity, obscurity, marginal inconsistency and a rich crop of litigation. Indeed, the conflict of opinion at the High Court level and the bone of contention before us arise from this drafting deficiency.

Legal Preface :

2. A thumb-nail sketch of the Act is a prefatory necessity. The Act defines small land-owner (S. 2(2)) having in mind the optimum ownership in the given conditions. Permissible area (S. 2 (3)) is a cognate concept limiting the maximum permissible extent a person may hold, and so long as he does not have any excess, he is a small land-holder. He can evict the tenants from his holding and be in actual enjoyment as provided by the Act. If, however, he has lands beyond the permissible area, he becomes a large land-owner and has to cough up the excess. However, he is given the option to choose the best area he desires to keep, called reserved area (S. 2(4)) and then he must make available to the State such excess called surplus area (S. 2(5-a)). This creation of a surplus pool or reservoir is vital to the success of the statutory project since, by distribution of such lands, rehabilitation of elected tenants and landless persons is to be accomplished. Maximisation of the surplus cool and suppression of evasion by large holders are of profound legislative concern.

3. Even if a person is a small holder, it is quite on the cards that by inheritance or other operation of law or by voluntary transfer, he may acquire lands in excess of the permissible limit. The law takes care to see that such excess is also made available for re-settlement of elects and their ilk. In short, the legislative mandate is that every agricultural holder in the State shall hold no more than the permissible area and the surplus in the hands of large holders, whether acquired by voluntary transactions or involuntary operation of law, will go to feed the surplus pool.

4. A semi-medieval set-up where considerable estates are cornered by a landed gentry, will naturally resist redistributive reform measures and try ingenious methodology to defeat the law. But the legislature has to be astute enough to outwit such devious devices and subtle subterfuges. With this end in view, the Act has been amended to block all escape routes unearthed by the lawmakers as often as the High Court has upheld certain patterns of alienations and oblique dealings by interpretative process. A study of the history of the Act and the provocation for and frequency of amendments thereto, suggests an unspoken anticism about judicial approach which we will refer to later. Suffice it to say that the law we are construing is a radical agrarian measure; its basic goals are to cut down large holdings and distribute lands to various landless people according to a design and to foster, according to legislative policy an agrarian community of peasant proprietors. De-hoarding and defeating hid