SANTRAM V. RAJINDER LAL, 1979 SC (1) RCJ 13
FACTS
The appellant, a Harijan by birth and a cobbler by vocation, was a petty tenant of the eastern half of a shop in Ram Bazar, Simla. The original landlord passed away and his sons, the respondents, stepped into his shoes as legal representatives. He filed a petition for eviction of the appellant-tenant under S.13(2) (ii) (b) of the East Punjab Urban Rent Restriction Act, 1949, as applied to Himachal Pradesh on the ground that the premises were being used for a purpose other than the one for which they were let out.
PROCEDURAL HISTORY
Rent Controller: ordered eviction.
Appellate Authority: reversed the finding of the Rent Controller and dismissed the petition for eviction.
High Court: restored the Rent Controller’s order.
ISSUE
Whether the respondent landlord made out the statutory ground for eviction, of having diverted the building for a use radically different from the one for which it was let, without his consent?
JUDGEMENT
The court observed that,
The dual uses of accommodation are common enough and, in this case, the landlord himself appears to have understood it that way. The evidence shows that the sympathetic father of the respondents had not objected to the petitioner living in the premises and had even provided a sink in the shop to facilitate such user.
Not that oral permission to divert the user to a different purpose is sufficient in the face of the statutory requirement of written consent but that circumstance of the landlord's acquiescence over a long stretch of time reinforces the case of the tenant that the purpose was two-fold.
It is impossible to hold that if a tenant who takes out petty premises for carrying on a small trade also stays in the rear portion, cooks and eats; he so disastrously perverts the purpose of the lease. This is not a case of a man switching over to a canteen business or closing down the cobbler shop and converting the place into a residential accommodation. On the other hand, the common case is that the cobbler continued to be cobbler and stayed in the shop at night on days when he was running his shop but left for his home on shop holidays. A sense of proportion in social assessment is of the judicial essence.
Therefore, it was held that, the irresistible inference, despite the ingenious argument to the contrary, is that the provision of S.13(2)(ii) has not been attracted. Appeal was allowed.