PURAN Vs. STATE OF HARYANA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The petitioners are twenty-four in number and are landholders in Village Baghpur, tehsil Jhajjar, district Rohtak. Each of them holds less than 30 standard acres of land which is the ceiling laid down under the Punjab Security of Land Tenures Act, 1953. In the writ petition they challenge the reservation of 88 standard Kanals of land for the income of the Gram Panchayat under Section 18 of the East Punjab Holdings (Consolidation and Prevention of Fragmentation) Act, 1948 (hereinafter called the Act). They challenge the vires of Section 18 of the Act as being violative of Article 31-A of the Constitution of India. They further allege that a proportionate cut to the extent of 10 per-cent had been applied to the land of each of the petitioners and other landholders to provide land for the common purposes of the village which was not in accordance with the rules. The petitioners filed Civil Miscellaneous No. 4457 of 1968 in which they sought permission to make the following addition as a sub-para to para 8 of the writ petition :-

(2.) This is the only plea that has been argued before me at the hearing. The reply to this plea on behalf of respondent No.1 has been given by Shri Sukhdev Parshad, Deputy Secretary to Government, Haryana, Revenue Department, in the following words :

(3.) The matter of reserving land for common purposes of the village without prescribing a scale came up for hearing before Narula, J. in Ganda Singh v. State of Punjab and others (C.W.No. 1303 of 1966) in which the learned Judge held as under :-