SECRETARY OF STATE Vs. LALDAS NARANDAS

JUDGEMENT

(1.) The respondent is the occupant of a land used for agricultural purposes and has been paying to Government assessment chargeable on "land appropriated" for those purposes under Clause (a) of Section 48 of the Bombay Land Revenue Code. During the seasons when the land is not used for agricultural purposes, the respondent has been letting it out for stacking timber and deriving profit from this special user of the land. Government by the suit which has led to this appeal claim the right to impose additional assessment on the land on account of that special user. They rely on Clause (b) of Section 48, which provides that land revenue shall be chargeable " upon land appropriated for any purpose from which any other profit or advantage than that ordinarily acquired by agriculture is derived." The word " appropriated " means in its natural sense, " made one's own," and conveys the idea of exclusion. " To appropriate " anything for any purpose is to set it apart for that purpose in exclusion of all other uses. American and English Encyclopaedia of Law; Whitehead V/s. Gibbons (1).

(2.) The context in which the clause in question occurs in Section 48 leads to the same conclusion. Clause (a) relates to " land appropriated for purpose of agriculture." That obviously means land devoted to agricultural purposes and no other. Similarly, Clause (c) relates to "land appropriated for building sites"-that is, land devoted to building purposes and no other. If the word " appropriated " has that meaning in Clauses (a) and (c), we must understand it in the same sense in clause (b) having regard to the ordinary canon of construction that a word, which occurs more than once in an Act, must be construed to have the same meaning throughout the Act unless some definition in it or the context shows that the legislature used the word in different senses.

(3.) Had the legislature intended Clause (b) to apply to land used both for agricultural and other purposes, it would have used apt language to convey its meaning. It would have referred to the land in Clause (b) as land appropriated for purposes of agriculture and other purposes except building sites. This is a taxing enactment, and must be construed strictly in favour of the subject.