KARNANI INDUSTRIAL BANK LTD Vs. RANJAN

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is an appeal from the order of the Commissioner for Workmen's Compensation, Bengal. The applicant was a workman engaged by one Kamil Sardar to do the work of putting up certain joists in a building in Park Street. Kamil Sardar was employed as a contractor by the Karnani Industrial Bank. It appears that the Karnani Industrial Bank was causing this house to be put up and it was getting the house put up by contracting with different people to do different parts of this work. It had evidently not entered into a contract with one builder to do the whole work, but it entered into contracts with particular persons employed in that behalf that particular parts of the work should be done on behalf of the bank. In these circumstances, the applicant having met with an injury by a joist falling on his leg, the commissioner has fixed the compensation at a lump sum of Rs. 514. Originally, the application was brought against Rai Bahadur Sukhlal Karnani personally but, in view of the written statement, the Karnani Industrial Bank was added as an opposite party and, in the end, the commissioner has made this award against the bank. The matter coming before us, it is pointed out that the liability of the bank depends upon the terms of Section 12, Act 8 of 1923.

(2.) That section deals with a case where the principal, as it calls him, in the course of or for the purpose of his trade or business contracts with any other person called the contractor for the execution by or under the contractor of the whole or any part of any work which is ordinarily part of the trade or business of the principal. If these conditions are fulfilled, the principal is made liable for compensation to the contractor's men. The first question therefore to which the commissioner had to address his mind was; Is it ordinarily part of the trade or business of this bank to put up joists as a house building operation ? Any ordinary notion one has of banking business would lead one prima facie to give a firm answer in the negative to that suggestion. The only evidence that was before the commissioner to satisfy him that it was ordinarily part of the business of this bank to undertake the erection of joists in a house is the circumstance that in the Memorandum of Association of the Limited Company, there is among the thirty-six objects of the usual redundant character one No. 14 which says: To build, erect, construct, lay down, enlarge, alter, equip, improve and maintain any offices, buildings, warehouses, godowns factories, wharves, mills, jetties, roadways, tramways, railways.

(3.) On the basis and on the basis of the fact that this bank was building this house, the commissioner found in favour of the applicant saying this: It is clear that the bank constructed the house in the course of its business as such bank and it is clear also from paras, 13 and 14 of the Memorandum of Association of the Karnani Industrial Bank Limited that the bank was competent to do so.