RUKMINI P KALBURGI Vs. STATE OF KARNATAKA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) These Petitions are disposed of by a common order since the facts are common in all these Petitions and the issues that arise for consideration are also common.

(2.) The petitioners claiming to be the owners of certain land in survey number 57/4 (renumbered as 57/109) situate at Shabanur Village, Davangere Taluk, have challenged the validity of the acquisition proceedings initiated by the authorities under the provisions of the Karnataka Improvement Boards Act, 1976 (hereinafter referred to as the Act). This land, it is not in dispute, forms a portion of survey number 57/4 and at the time of acquisition by the authorities under the Act, it had been converted into non-agricultural land and the petitioners had also obtained permission of the City Municipal Council, Davangere, as also from the Director of Town Planning for setting up a residential layout. After setting up the said layout the land was divided into 50 sites and it is the case of the petitioners that sites numbering 34 to 50 were allotted to P.K. Kalburgi, who is one of the petitioners herein, and petitioners 1 to 3 got sites numbered as 1 to 11, 12 to 22 and 23 to 33 respectively.

(3.) The petitioners have challenged the validity of the acquisition proceedings on various grounds : Briefly stated there was no proper service of notices on them in terms of the provisions of Section 15 of the Act ; that the description of the land was not correctly mentioned in the Preliminary as also in the Final Notifications ; that the area of the land mentioned in the Preliminary Notification suffers from certain discrepancies as also the boundaries of the said land and that all these only showed that the authorities had gone about the matter in a most desultory and careless manner which further discloses that the entire acquisition proceedings were vitiated by non-application of mind to the relevant material facts on record. Their further case is that the proceedings were also violative of Article 14 of the Constitution in that the procedure prescribed under the Act, more particularly Sections 15, 16 and 18 of the Act, is wholly arbitrary and unlike the relevant provisions of Land Acquisition Act, this special Act had denied the petitioners the right of hearing and therefor their valuable right to their properties had been taken away without following the procedure prescribed under the Land Acquisition Act. According to the petitioners, the land in question could have been acquired only as per the procedure prescribed under the Land Acquisition Act and the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act are complimentary to the provisions of this Special Act in view of the provisions of Section 68 of the Act and, therefore, there was no good ground for the authorities to dispense with the procedure prescribed under Section 5A of the Land Acquisition Act which provided the aggrieved parties a right of hearing either in person or though their pleader and such a valuable right had been taken away by the provisions of the special Act. They have also made a very serious grievance about the time lag in publishing the final notification. According to them, if the authorities had applied the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act they could not have published the final notification after 3 years from the date of the Preliminary Notification. The very fact that the authorities had taken 45 months to issue the Final Notification is indicative of the fact that the land in question was not at all required for the purpose for which it was sought to be acquired and no good reasons are forthcoming as to why there was such an extraordinary delay in making the declaration and the Final Notification dated 4-2-1984.