Bharat Motor Transport Company Private Ltd., Ludhiana vs Sunder Lal and Others

Falshaw, C.J.—This is a tenant''s revision petition against an order of ejectment passed by the Rent Controller and upheld by the Appellate Authority.

The case has a long history. The property was formerly evacuee property before it became the property of the landlords who are three brothers and their widowed mother. The ejectment petition which was based on grounds of non-payment of rent, personal requirement and nuisance was originally filed on the 29th of April, 1959. The tenant is a transport company, the Bharat Motor Transport Co. (P) Ltd., and it was held in the first trial that the premises were non-residential, ejectment being granted only on the ground of non-payment of rent. On the tenant''s appeal the case was remanded in December, 1964, but the ejectment order was passed again on the ground of non-payment of rent and this time the tenant''s appeal was dismissed by the learned Appellate Authority.

The relevant facts regarding non-payment of rent are not now in dispute, although it was the landlords'' case in their petition that the tenant had paid no rent after the 4th of January 1958, the date when the tenant was directed by the Custodian Department to attorn to the landlords. Two months'' rent was paid by the tenant to Sardari Lal, the Manager of firm Sawaya Mal Sant Ram, for which he issued the receipts R. 1 and R. 2. Thereafter three months'' rent was remitted to the landlords by money order and accepted by them, and it is admitted that if all these sums are treated as rent paid they would be sufficient, together with the sum deposited by the tenant in Court at the outset of the ejectment proceedings, to save him from ejectment on the ground of non-payment of rent. The dispute is confined to the rent amounting to Rs. 360/- covered by the receipts R. 1 and R. 2 which have been held both by the learned Rent Controller and the learned Appellate Authority not to have been payments to the landlords in spite of the fact that the tenant produced Sardari Lal as a witness and Sardari Lal stated that he was the Manager of the firm Sawaya Mal Sant Ram of which the landlords were partners. The witness was also asked to produce the account books of the landlords, but the account books were not produced. The learned Appellate Authority has more or less come to the conclusion that a trick has been played on the tenant who has in fact paid the rent but it has been held that the tenant failed to prove that Sardari Lal had any authority to accept the rent on behalf of the landlords.

It seems to me that this finding is based on a wrong view of where the onus lay in this case. This is not an ordinary civil suit to recover a debt in which repayment is pleaded and the plaintiff denies the authority of the recipient of the payment. It is an ejectment suit in which different considerations arise in view of the object of the Act which is the protection of tenants. Surely, if the tenant proved the payments in question to the Manager of the firm of which the landlords are partners, it was for the landlords to show that the payments were not received by them and were misappropriated by Sardari Lal, the person who received and acknowledged the payments. At this stage I may mention that the transfer by the Custodian Department was only to Sunder Lal in the first place and it was to Sunder Lal that the tenant was directed to attorn. The account books showing how the money was dealt with after it had been received by Sardari Lal have been withheld and two of the landlords have not had the courage to deny that the payments were actually received and credited to the landlords. It is further to be noted that the landlords accepted payments made by money order for three months subsequent to the period referred to in these receipts without ever objecting that they had not received the rent for the earlier months. In my opinion the facts in this case were sufficient to place the onus on the landlords of showing that the payments acknowledged in the receipts R. 1 and R. 2 were not received by them and there is not an iota of evidence to discharge this onus. I accordingly accept the revision petition and dismiss the landlords'' petition for the ejectment of the tenant with costs. Counsel''s fee Rs 50/-.