SHARIF AHMAD Vs. REGIONAL TRANSPORT AUTHORITY MEERUT

JUDGEMENT

(1.) In this batch of seven appeals by special leave the points involved are identical. It is a glaring example of unnecessary litigation between the various stage carriage operators, which could have been avoided if the State Government of Uttar Pradesh would not have come out with varying laws and oscillating policies. The facts of all the appeals are similar and common except in regard to the parties, routes in question, and some other consequential details. We proceed to state the facts from Civil Appeal No. 1214 of 1977 only.

(2.) Under Section 47 (3) of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1939 - hereinafter to be referred to as the Central Act - the Regional Transport Authority, Meerut had limited the number of state carriage permits to be thirty only for the route Meerut Rohta Sinauli Baraut. In or about the year 1971 an advertisement was made calling for the applications to fill up eight vacancies, as twenty-two permits out of the limit of thirty having been already granted were operative and in force. In October, 1971 the Regional Transport Authority granted eight permits to the respondents in one appeal or the other. Fifty applicants who were not granted permits by the Regional Transport Authority filed appeals before the State Transport Appellate Tribunal (for brevity, hereinafter the Appellate Tribunal) under Section 64 of the Central Act. While the said appeals were pending, the U. P. Motor Vehicles Amendment Ordinance No. 9 of 1972 was promulgated on March 16, 1972. It was replaced by The Motor Vehicles (Uttar Pradesh Amendment) Act, 1972 - U. P. Act No. 25 of 1972 - hereinafter called the U. P. Act of 1972. By the Ordinance followed by the Act aforesaid, Section 43A was inserted in the Central Act after Section 43 authorising the State Government to "issue such directions of a general character as it may consider necessary or expedient in the public interest in respect of any matter relating to road transport" to the various Transport Authorities. The object of the Act was to do away with the limit on the number of permits to be granted for stage carriages. Sub-section (2) of Section 43-A, in particular, empowered the State Government in public interest to issue a direction by a notification in the Gazette to grant permits to all eligible applicants except in respect of routes or areas for which schemes had been published under Section 68C of the Central Act. Some amendments were brought about in Section 47 of the Central Act. But for the purposes of these appeals the one to be pin-pointed is the deletion of sub-section (3) from Sec. 47, the consequence of which was to delimit the number of permits to be granted for a particular route. On March 30, 1972, a notification was issued by the State Government under Sec. 43-A (2) of the U. P. Act of 1972 directing the Transport Authorities to grant stage carriage permits to all the eligible applicants. Some of the stage carriage permit holders on various routes in U. P., including some of the respondents, challenged the validity of the U. P. Ordinance followed by the U. P. Act of 1972 and the notification dated March 30, 1972 by filing writ petitions in the Allahabad High Court. The High Court dismissed their writ petitions. They came up in appeal to this Court. The appeals were dismissed and the constitutional validity of the impugned law and the notification was upheld by a Bench of four learned Judges including one of us (Goswami J.) The decision of this Court is reported in Hans Raj Kehar v. The State of U. P. (1975) 2 SCR 916.

(3.) The decision of this Court was handed down on December 4, 1974. The appeals remained pending before the Appellate Tribunal because of this first round of litigation. Eventually the appeals were allowed on February 19, 1975 be the Appellate Tribunal and each one of the fifty applicants was granted one permit over and above the eight already granted by the Regional Transport Authority. Pursuant to the order of grant made by the Appellate Tribunal, permits were to be issued by the Regional Transport Authority if the grantee produced a fit vehicle, meaning therey roadworthy vehicle, registered in his name be the 31st March, 1975 and if by the said date he filed an affidavit sworn by him before the Regional Transport Authority to the effect that he had not been convicted of any criminal offence under Indian Penal Code during the preceding five years. The Appellate Tribunal, in its order, had further made it clear that the time fixed by it for the implementation of the order of grant was under no circumstances to be extended and if any of the applicants failed to comply with it, sanction of the permit in favour of the defaulting applicant was to stand automatically revoked. The appellants, however, complied with the order and fulfilled the conditions of the grant within time. But before permits could be actually issued, another round of litigation started at the instance of Rama Kant Ahluwalia and others who had been granted eight permits by the Regional Transport Authority as per its Resolution passed on October 29, 1971. They challenged the order of the Appellate Tribunal by filing a writ petition in the High Court which was summarily dismissed on February 27, 1975. Three more writ petitions filed by some other operators challenging the very same order of the Appellate Tribunal were also dismissed after hearing on September 10, 1975. It may be stated here at this stage that permits were not actually issued even though the High Court had vacated the stay orders sometime in June or July, 1975.