MT GIRIJA BALA Vs. MANINDRA LAL SINGHA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) This is an appeal from a decision of the District Judge of Chittagong in an application for grant of letters of administration with the Will annexed to the estate of one Ram Das Dutta who died in 1879. The learned District Judge has made a partial or limited grant to the applicants in respect of the properties comprised in Schedules 3 and 4 of the Will. The applicants appeal on the ground that they desire a grant which would cover Schedules 1 and 2 as well. The matter is one of some complication and a good deal of misconception seems to have encrusted round it.

(2.) The Will of Ram Das divided his properties into five schedules. The 5 Schedule property was left to his nephew Ram Kumar, and in 1915 a grant of letters was made to Ram Kumar limited to properties comprised in Schedule 5. So far as understand the only power to grant letters of administration with the Will annexed, limited to certain specific assets, is the power conferred by Section 42 of the Probate and Administration Act. Whether this was or was not a proper order in this case is not a matter on which this Court need at this time of day pronounce. The nature of that order, however, is a matter of some importance in these proceedings but it has not been produced before us and is in no way discussed in the lower Court. What the exact form of it was I do not know but I presume that the learned Judge was satisfied that the Will was a Will duly made and was merely desirous of limiting the intromissions of Ram Kumar with the testator's estate to this particular schedule. In these circumstances whether in order to establish the title of a legatee to other property it is in the least necessary for some one else to get another grant is a question. There having been a grant limited under Section 42, any other application for grant of letters to this estate would, I should have thought, come under Section 44 which deals with the case: Whenever a grant with exceptions of probate or letters of administration with or without the Will annexed has bean made, the person entitled to probate or administration of the remainder of the deceased's estate may take a grant of probate or letters of administration, as the case may be, of the rest of the deceased's estate.

(3.) If there is one thing which requires to be stopped peremptorily, it is the idea that different people are going to get individual grants of letters of administration limited to the particular property which they happen to claim and that is a course which seems to have been adopted as the correct course in the District Court at Chittagong, so far as this estate is concerned. For myself I protest against it entirely. The only application that I should be prepared, in the absence of extraordinarily strong facts, to entertain would be an application under Section 41 for a grant of letters of administration to the rest of the testator's estate.