S SWAMINATHAN Vs. STATE OF TAMIL NADU

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THE petitioner herein is a Central Government servant working in the postal department and he was allotted Premises No. 41, Royapettah High Road by the Government on a monthly rent of rs. 55/ -. THE said premises was earlier requisitioned by the Government. THE owner of the premises applied for release of the said premises on the ground that he required the premises bona fide for his own occupation. Though similar requests from the owner had been rejected on earlier occasions, the accommodation Controller has chosen to direct the release of the building by an order dated 1-7-1982. In pursuance of the said order releasing the building at the instance of the owner, the petitioner who was an allottee was directed to deliver possession of the building under threat of a forcible eviction by an order dated 2-6-1983. THE said order was received by the petitioner on 7-6-1983 and the petitioner thereafter filed an appeal to the first respondent herein, the State Government, on 20-7-1983. THE Government had chosen to entertain that appeal and has disposed of the same on merits holding that the owner of the building has established his bona fide require- ment for his own occupation and in that view dismissed the appeal filed by the petitioner. Aggrieved by the order of dismissal of his appeal, the petitioner has filed the present writ petition for quashing the order of the Government made in G. O. Ms. No. 365 Home dated 15-2-1984. Apart from questioning the order of the Government on merits, the petitioner has also raised a ground that in so far as the Accommodation Controller did not fix any specified date for hearing and give notice of the same to the parties before him, the ultimate order passed by him stands vitiated for not following the procedure set out in Rules 11 and 12 of the Tamil Nadu Buildings (Lease and Rent Control) Rules, 1974.

(2.) WHEN the Writ Petition was taken up for hearing, the learned Additional Government Pleader appearing for the first and the second respondents and the counsel appearing for the third respondent, the owner of the premises, have raised an objection as to the maintainability of the writ petition and their objections are two-fold. One is that as the petitioner being only a licensee and as his rights flow only from the Government who had directed the release of the building and as he has no independent right in relation to the subject-matter he cannot maintain this writ petition against the orders of the Government. The second is that even assuming that the writ petition is maintainable , the petitioner is not entitled to succeed therein as his appeal before the Government was admittedly time barred and as such the Government should not have entertained the appeal and disposed of the same on merits.

(3.) IRRESPECTIVE of the fact whether the petitioner is entitled to file an appeal before the Government as a party to the proceeding, the question to be considered now is whether the petitioner whose appeal has been rejected by the Government can come before this Court as an aggrieved party or not. If a person files an appeal before the Government and that appeal is rejected, no reasoning is necessary to show that he is an aggrieved person by the rejection of his appeal by the Government. Such a person can maintain a writ petition before this Court. In such a case he is not coming before this court as a mere allottee but as a person whose appeal has been rejected by the Government. In this view of the matter, I am not inclined to uphold the objection taken by the learned counsel for the respondents that the petitioner cannot maintain the writ petition before this court. The special facts that arise in this case were not present in the cases decided by Sathiadev , J. and Mohan, J. referred to above. Hence those decisions do not stand in the way of the petitioner maintaining the writ petition.