MUNICIPAL COUNCIL BY ITS CHAIRMAN Vs. TSHANMUGA MOOPANAR

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The Tuticorin Municipal Council, which through its Chairman preferred this Revision Petition, resolved to require wholesale dealers in grain to take out licences under Section 249 of the Madras District Municipalities Act (V of 1920) and accordingly published a notification under Section 328 in the Ttnnevelly District Gazette. The respondent, who was one of such wholesale dealers, paid the fees demanded of him under protest and brought a suit in the Small Cause Court to recover what was illegally collected from him. He succeeded in obtaining a decree for a portion of his claim. The District Munsif held that he was not liable to take out licences for godowns in which rice and broken rice, etc., were stored for wholesale trade but only for grain stores. It is contended for the petitioner that the word " grain " in Scheduel V (10) to the Act includes rice and broken rice. The District Munsif observed: Paddy without husk is rice. Rice is not a seed and does not sprout out. Hence rice or broken rice cannot be called a grain.

(2.) If the District Munsif meant by this that the distinction between grain and rice depended on the existence or absence of the power of germination, I think he went near the mark without hitting it. The germ or seed is in the rice. The outer husk merely serves as a protection from water and other external agencies which would penetrate and destroy the germ.

(3.) In the English language "corn", which is derived from the same Latin word "granum" as "grain" is, is commonly used to mean the grain of certain cereals, specially wheat in England, and maize in America, while growing. Thus an Englishman would speak of a field of growing wheat as a field of corn, but he would never include other plants grown from seed such as turnips, clover, mustard, etc., under the head of "corn".After the wheat is harvested and threshed it is still corn and it is sold in a corn market, but after it has gone through a mill and become flour or meal, the individual corns or grains cannot be distinguished, and a substance is produced which is not corn or grain but something else. This meaning of the word "grain" was brought out in a case that went up to the House of Lords and is reported in Cotton V/s. Vogan and Co. (1896) A.C. 457 Lord Hers- chell in interpreting the meaning of the words which occur in the Metage on Grain (Port of London.) Act of 1872 "In respect of all grains brought into the port of London for sale," observed, If the Legislature had intended to include what had always been regarded and treated as manufactured articles such as flour and meal, as distinguished from the natural products of the earth untreated except by gathering, the language would have been altogether different.