AMBICA TRADING CO Vs. BANK OF BARODA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) Defendants 1 and 2 have filed this petition against the rejection of their application filed under Order 13 Rule 2 CPC whereby they sought permission to produce five documents, out of which the trial Court has permitted the production of only one document, i.e., in the stock statement. The other documents such as Day Book, Ledgers etc., were not permitted on the ground that the defendants have not established their relevancy. I have perused the application filed by the petitioners as well as the order under revision, apart from the pleadings in the case. As contended by the learned counsel for the petitioners, I do not find any discussion about the cause shown by the petitioners for the late production of the documents. The entire order proceeds to find out the relevancy of the documents sought to be produced.

(2.) The application is filed under Order 13, Rule 2 CPC, which governs belated production of documents. The said provision states that,

(3.) From this, it is clear that the application has to be rejected unless good cause is shown for the non-production of the documents earlier; the Court will have to be satisfied of the cause shown. If the application satisfies the Court of the cause for the belated production and the Court is satisfied that the cause shown is a good one, the production will have to be permitted. That is the clear purport of sub-rule (2) of Order 13 CPC. Question of relevancy comes at a later stage. Without the documents before it, I fail to understand as to how the Court can reject the documents as irrelevant. In fact, Rule 3 of Order 13 shows that the question of relevancy arises only after the production of the documents. At this stage of the application, the Court is concerned only with the cause shown by the applicant. The trial Court has overlooked this basic question while rejecting the application filed by the petitioners.