CONTROLLER OF ESTATE DUTY Vs. KAMALAMMA B DR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THIS is a reference under the E.D. Act, 1953. The question is whether, for the purpose of estate duty leviable on the estate of a deceased Hindu, a reasonable provisions for marriage of his unmarried daughter can be allowed as a deductible debt ?

(2.) THE deceased, in this case, died possessed of an estate worth Rs. 4,17,844. THE estate comprised of both ancestral property and self-acquisitions. THE deceased was survived by his wife and a minor daughter aged 17. THE deceased's widow filed an estate duty account with the Assistant Controller of Estate Duty. She claimed, inter alia, a deduction for Rs. 72,000 as provision for the marriage of the daughter. THE Asst. Controller, however, negatived this claim. He took the view that the obligation to get the daughter married was a personal obligation of the deceased and was not a charge on the estate. THE Appellate Controller and the Appellate Tribunal, however, took a different view. THEy held that under the Hindu law a n obligation of this sort is enforceable against the ancestral property which the deceased died possessed of. THEy, however, limited the allowance in this case to Rs. 50,000 as representing a reasonable provision, as against the amount of Rs. 72,000 which the accountable person claimed as a deduction.

(3.) FOR the accountable person it is urged that it ill-becomes the Department to treat the settlement of the property as a discharge of the decease's obligation towards the daughter's marriage when the Department had set at nought the settlement by imposing estate duty even on the settled property as property deemed to pass under s. 9 of the Act. The Department, it was said, cannot have it both ways. This contention of the accountable person can be rested only on some broad equitable considerations. Equity and estate duty, however, are strangers. That s. 9 imposes an extra burden on the dutiable estate can be no reason for claiming a countervailing allowance to neutralize its effect otherwise. The E D Act carries a number of similar deeming provisions which employ legal fictions for treating what ordinarily would be non-dutiable property as dutiable property. But there is no evidence in the statue of a general policy to go the whole hog with the statutory fictions and make corresponding provision for allowance and deductions as well, in every situation in which the property is deemed to pass. The fictions under the Act generally stop short with laying the charge; they do not extend their field to deductions climbable by the accountable person. The Act no doubt includes a provision or two applying the statutory fiction even to the subject-matter of deductions. But the mischief of these rare provisions is not to allow deductions, but to disallow them. Witness, for instances, ss. 45 and 46.