CHOWBEY TAMBAKU FACTORY Vs. STATE OF BIHAR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) M/s Chowbey Tambaku Factory calls itself a partnership firm and carries on business in Mohalla Mandroja, District Bhagalpur. The petitioner firm sells chewing tobacco. The petitioner acknowledges in paragraph 3, that chewing tobacco is popularly know as 'khaini'. This matter relates to the levy of market fee under the Bihar Agricultural Produce Markets Act, 1960.

(2.) The petition has been filed with a very clear intention that petitioner seeks a direction restraining the respondents, the State of Bihar, the Bihar State Agricultural Marketing Board, the Agricultural Produce Market committee, Bhagalpur and the Secretary, Agricultural Produce Market Committee, Bhagalpur, from enforcing the provision of the Bihar Agricultural Produce Markets Act, 1960 (here-in-after referred to as the Act).

(3.) The petition makes a long recital in trying to place legal submissions, to the. effect, that State of Bihar does not have any legislative power to levy market fee on tobacco. The Court has gone through the writ petition in its submission and finds that there is not a whisper nor a word on the mechanism of the manner in which market fee has been scheduled to be levied on tobacco. The subject on which the levy is made, is not tobacco. It is narcotics. In the circumstances, Submissions made in the writ petition are out of context and irrelevant. Perhaps they may have been made to divert the attention of the State on a mis-conceived notion that the levy on tobacco is beyond its legislative power and in the circumstances the question of a market committee concerned requiring returns to be filed and, thereafter, an assessment on sale of tobacco does not arise.