RATTAN LAL Vs. VARDESH CHANDER

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This fifth deck appeal, by certificate under Art. 133 of the Constitution, stems from a humdrum but protracted litigation under the rent control law by a tenant who has lost all along the way. If we may prologise, this special law hopefully set up a quasijudicial machinery for summary trial and speedy disposal and prescribed eviction save upon simple grounds safeguarding the security of tenants of buildings against being inequitably ejected. But this very case disclose the chronic distortion in processual justice, caused by a slow-motion sprawl of appeals and plethora of technical pleas defeating the statutory design.

(2.) The obvious legislative policy and project in this class of simplistic landlord-tenant litigation demands a radically non-traditional judicial structuring and legal engineering, by-passing sophistications and formalisms and tier-upon-tier of judicial reviews. Both these impertives are conspicuously absent in current rent control litigation a dismal failure which the legislature will, we hope, awaken to rectify. Post-audit of socio-economic laws in action, with a view to over-see if legal institutions and jural postulates actually achieve legislatively mandated objectives in special classes of disputeprocessing, makes for competent and credible implementation of laws and saves the time of the higher courts and the money of the public at present consumed exasperatingly but avoidably. The price of legislative inaction in these areas is popular disenchantment with laws and tribunals. Factual matrix

(3.) The appellant is the tenant of a building in Delhi having been inducted into possession by the respondent-landlord under a letting of May 19, 1954, evidenced by a deed which fixed the term merely as less than a year (a circumstance out of which a minor ripple of legal argument has arisen). At the time of the lease the Transfer of Property Act, 1882 (for short, the T. P. Act), had not been extended to Delhi although, later, on Dec. 1, 1962, the said Act was made applicable to this area. The landlord had been receiving rent from the tenant until the time he filed a petition for eviction (1967), the statute which regulated the right to eviction being the Delhi Rent Control Act, 1958 (59 of 1958) (for short, the Rent Act). The eviction petition set out two grounds out of the many specified in Sec. 14 of the Rent Act, viz., unauthorized sub-letting of a portion of the premises and possession, by the tenant, of alternative accommodation. Both these grounds having been made out, the evictibility under the Rent Act became inevitable. But, in the High Court, the appellant-tenant fell back on certain defences grounded on Ss. 106 and 111 of the T. P. Act on the score that no notice to quit had been given, nor notice of forfeiture, as prescribed by those sections. There is no dispute that neither notice to quit, nor notice of forfeiture determining the tenancy had been given by the landlord. The core of the controversy thus turns on the need to comply with the requirements of Ss. 106 and/or 111 of the T. P. Act and the fatal effect of failure in this behalf. The landlord seeks to break through these defences by urging that the lease has expired by efflux of time limited thereby under Section 111 (a) and no notice terminating the tenancy under Sec. 106 is needed and further that the forfeiture of the tenancy caused by sub-letting contrary to the terms of the deed of demise can be availed of by the landlord even in the absence of a notice as contemplated by Section 111 (g) because the T. P. Act, as amended by the Amending Act of 1929, did not, in terms, apply to the present lease and the principles of justice, equity and good conscience, which alone applied, did not desiderate the technical requirement of a notice in writing of an intention to determine the lease.