MALABAR PRODUCE EXPORT CO Vs. NEDUNGADI BANK LTD

JUDGEMENT

(1.) In the infancy of my professional career I used to hear Justice Vaidalingam sitting in the very court where I now sit, exhorting to the members of the Bar the necessity and desirability of pressing into service the provisions of O.11 of the Code of Civil Procedure relating to discovery and inspection and serving of interrogatories with a view to shorten the life of the litigation and to have effective adjudication of the issues arising in a suit. Perhaps, the learned Judge was drawing on his rich experience at the Bar in the Madras High Court with its original side jurisdiction and where those provisions had been usefully employed by the members of the Bar, particularly in the commercial litigations. In so doing, the learned Judge was really echoing the sentiments expressed about a century back by the Judges of the English High Court about this "equitable device employed in the Court of Chancery for obtaining the disclosure and inspection of relevant documents as well as the disclosure and admissions of relevant facts". (See Halsbury's Laws of England, Fourth Edition, Volume 13, page 3). Tomlin, J. expressed the usefulness of interrogatories in forceful language in Duke of Sutherland v. British Dominions Land Settlement Corporation Ltd. (1926) 1 Ch. 746 at page 753 in the following words:

(2.) The legal provisions in this regard in our country are now governed by O.11 of the Code of Civil Procedure. This revision petition concerns an application made for discovery under the provisions of O.11 R.12, CPC. It is desirable to extract that provision for facilitating easy reference:

(3.) The question which arises in this revision petition is whether the dismissal of the Application I. A. No. 4584 of 1980 made by the defendants in the suit for discovery of documents was so vitiated in law as to be interfered with in revision under S.115, CPC. The suit filed by the Nedungadi Bank Ltd. was for recovery of the balance amount due to the Bank from the defendants' customers of the bank. The plaintiff claimed that the transactions between the Bank and the defendants commenced in and continued from the year 1975. The defence raised various contentions. That the plaintiff had not credited certain amounts paid by the defendants was one such contention. An excessive levy of interest by the Bank was yet another. Other contentions are not relevant for the purpose of this revision petition.