WAZI AHMED Vs. STATE OF WEST BENGAL

JUDGEMENT

(1.) THESE cases raise a tempest, not in a tea pot but in a pot of ginger. The point that we have to decide is whether green ginger is covered by item No. 6 of the Schedule to the Bengal Finance (Sales Tax) Act, 1941, which contains an enumeration of the items which are exempted from liability to pay sales tax under the Act. Before entering into an analysis of that entry it may be mentioned that in all these cases the petitioners who are dealers of ginger were assessed to sales tax after rejecting their objection that they were exempted under the entry referred to and their appeal before the next higher authority, who is opposite party No. 2, has also been rejected.

(2.) THE relevant item in the Schedule is "vegetables, green or dried, commonly known as sabji, tarkari or sak". It is to be noted that the words "commonly known as sabji, tarkari or sak" were added to this entry by the Bengal Finance (Sales Tax) (Amendment) Act, 1954 (West Bengal Act 19 of 1954 ). There is an exception to this item in column 2 of the Schedule as follows : "except when sold in sealed containers. " This means that in order to claim exemption under this item the article must be in its natural form and not contained in a sealed container. We are of course not concerned with that because in these cases ginger was not sold in sealed containers but in its natural form. The word "vegetable", as such, had come up for interpretation in several cases.

(3.) IN this case the court was determining the nature of betel leaves and, applying the popular test, the court excluded betel leaves because even though technically they were parts of a plant they could not be grown in a kitchen garden nor were they meant to be used for the table. In another case decided about the same time, the same popular test was applied : Ram Bux Chaturbhuj v. State of Rajasthan ([1961] 12 S. T. C. 330 ).