TMI Blog1975 (5) TMI 87X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... the owners of those items have not come up in appeal to this Court. The relevant notification under s. 4( 1) was made on August 12, 1959 and so the compensation has to be pegged to the market value as on that date. Of course, 16 years have rolled by since, thanks to delay which has come to stay in the administrative and forensic processes of our land. That is by the way. The Land Acquisition Officer awarded ₹ 800/- per ground. The City Civil Court, approaching the problem of valuation plot-wise, as for a housing colony, made the necessary deductions involved in that process and awarded at the rate of ₹ 1,000/- per ground. The High Court, on appeal, made an upward revision, discarding the trial court's approach and awarded ₹ 1,800/- per ground. The State has not come up in appeal, but the unquenched claimant asks for more in appeal, demanding at least ₹ 2,200/- per ground. Generally speaking, a cardinal component in the escalation of prices of urban realty which does not find sufficient expression in the ancient Land Acquisition Act, 1894 is the developmental operations inevitable in a rapidly industrialising society for which the individual owner mak ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... this facet because the appellant himself purchased the land in question just ten months before the notification under s. 4(1), at a price of ₹ 410 per ground. There was a pond in the pot, the filling up of which is alleged to have cost some extra money according to the appellant, but he gave no evidence before the court on this matter with the result that we are left with the estimate made by the Public Works Department for the filling up of the pond which works out at a much lesser figure. In short, less than a year before the date of commencement of acquisition proceedings, the appellant himself had purchased this land at a price around ₹ 450 (making allowance for the pond which he had filled up) and he has been awarded ₹ 1,800 per ground by the High Court Instead of wandering around neighboring lands or guessing as to what the price of the disputed land might have been, we have before us the actual purchase of the suit property by the appellant himself and he has not set up any case of. special features or circumstances depressing the land value or affecting the particular transaction so that one could ignore that sale as the product of artificial circumstance ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... e (1) opinion of experts, (2) the price paid within a reasonable time in bone fide transactions of purchase of the lands acquired or the lands adjacent to the lands acquired and possessing similar advantages and (3) a number of years purchase of the actual or immediately prospective profits of the lands acquired . (p. 432, para 9-emphasis, ours) Appreciating this lethal consequence, Sri Natesan, learned counsel, suggested rather obscurely that there might have been peculiar possibilities why this land was sold to his client at a low price. But the reasoning breaks down because the claimant has not even hinted in his pleading or cared to testify what special circumstances played upon the transaction by which he got this identical land at the price he paid. We cannot be swayed by surmises floating in mid- air, particularly where the party who urges these feathery likelihoods stood mute at the trial stage. He failed to speak only to become a martyr for silence. Sri Natesan switched on to the prices of other lands in the locality to overcome the self-created obstacle of his client's purchase. This is specious logic. When decisive evidence of the market value of the land compu ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X ..... Having gone through the documents in question we are satisfied that none of the sales bear marks of throw away prices. The other argument that prices must have inexorably risen from 1949 to 1959 is no axiomatic proposition. True, generally speaking, there has been an inflationary spiral in India which has not spared really. But there is evidence in the present case to show that between 1949 and 1952 lands in this very area stood stationary in their prices. Various geo-economic factors have affected land prices, some to boost them, others to slump them. Therefore we cannot be persuaded to hold that a relentless rise in land prices has come to stay. Take but one example : If a land adjoins a factory which needs to be expanded further, a higher price may be offered by that factory owner. Likewise, if a heavy tax on construction of buildings or ceiling on vacant urban land is in the offing, prices of building sites may come down. It may even be said that such a factor as the application of the MISA to smugglers may depress prices of many items, including land and foreign cars, in certain places. Another exotic example. In some American cities the influx of certain colored races into ..... X X X X Extracts X X X X X X X X Extracts X X X X
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