ANANT CONSTRUCTION PRIVATE LIMITED Vs. RAM NIWAS

JUDGEMENT

(1.) "Procedure is but the machinery of law after all- the channel and means whereby law is administered and justice reached. It strangely departs from its proper office where in place of facilitating, it is permitted to obstruct and even to extinguish the legal rights and is made to govern where it ought to subserve''-said Lord Penzance. And here is a practice, not even procedure, having no sanction in law (at least none brought to my notice), which has provenly outlived its utility and which by experience has been found obstructing the smooth flow of justice, far from facilitating it. It must be done away with; and sooner the better.

(2.) This is a suit for specific performance of a contract for sale filed in the year 1982. Twelve years have passed. The suit is yet to witness commencement of its trial; thanks to the loose practice of filing replications /rejoinders which has assumed a vide currency without having any foundation in the rules of procedure or in CPC.

(3.) There are two sets of defendants: defendants No. 1 to 4 and defendants No. 5 to 6. Two separate written statements were filed in the year 1983. The defendant No.4 filed yet another written statement of his own. The plaintiff filed replications to each of the written statements. Replications so filed are nothing but mere denials of all the averments made in the written statement. Each of the averments made in the written statement has been reproduced in the replication and then denied. The recording of evidence was to commence in January, 1990. It had to be deferred for want of an original document before the Court. And then there has been a flood of applications; each application followed by a reply and by a replication; each step accompanied by an adjournment for the purpose.