S B NORONAH Vs. PREM KUMARI KHANNA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This appeal is symptomatic of a social pathology which afflicts the justice system at every level with none concerned to cure it.

(2.) The extraordinary scarcity of accommodation in our country has produced the litigative and legislative phenomena of tenants' protection laws and interminable 'eviction' cases. The situation cries for a social audit of the explosive expansion of ruinous and pathetic 'rent control litigation' and an urgent yet dynamic policy of promoting house construction for the lower brackets of Indian humanity.

(3.) A landlady let out her premises to another lady several years ago (1968) for a term and, thereafter, from time to time, continued the possession of the tenant on fresh lease and increase in rent. Every time there was homage to the law by grant of sanction by the Rent Controller under Section 21 of the Delhi Rent Control Act, 1958 (the Act, for short), as if the letting were of a residential accommodation. It is apparent that all these years an elitist 'residential school' is being run in the premises and that is the purpose expressly recited in all but the last lease deed of December 1975. This lease recites blandly that 'the lessee requires a suitable accommodation for residential purposes'. The period of the lease having expired the landlady applied for summary eviction by application for execution - a novel procedure enjoyed by the landlords of this capital city which relieves them of the need even to file a suit for eviction. The tenant, whose expensive and lucrative school was about to be uprooted for want of a habitation, hunted for a legal plea to resist the threat of dispossession. Technicality is the unfailing resource of an Indian litigant and the ingenious defense, among others, was set up that because the application for eviction did not mention that the letting was 'in writing' it was fatally flawsome. Better pleas which merited serious consideration were overruled but this little infirmity in the pleading loomed large in the eyes of the Rent Controller who, for that reason alone, rejected the relief.