High Court judgments and orders from across India, with the legal point made clear.
A division bench led by Chief Justice Vibhu Bakhru upheld the Tribunal decision to drop eight companies, including Infosys, Wipro and Tata Elxsi, from the transfer pricing benchmark for Logica Private Ltd for assessment year 2007-08, and backed a 15 per cent related-party filter, holding that size and brand change margins and that none of the Revenue questio
A division bench of Justice Mohit Kumar Shah and Justice Sourendra Pandey dismissed the Letters Patent Appeal of a Rohtas contractor, holding that a money claim filed about eight years after part payment in 2015 fails the three-year limitation yardstick the Supreme Court laid down in Bhailal Bhai, and that Article 226 cannot be used to defeat the law of limi
A Gwalior Bench of Justice G.S. Ahluwalia and Justice Anuradha Shukla confirmed the conviction of Chhatrapal Rawat for kidnapping, raping and strangling a nine-year-old girl at a village wedding in May 2022, on the evidence of an 11-year-old cousin who saw him carry the sleeping child away and DNA matches across the clothes of both, but held the case was not
Justice Harish Kumar dismissed a writ petition sent down by the Supreme Court in which laboratory assistants redesignated as demonstrators before 1991 sought teacher pay, holding that the 2017 Durga Prasad Singh direction protects their existing designation, status, rank and pay but cannot confer the status of teacher or benefits that conflict with the 2012
A division bench of Justice Vivek Rusia and Justice Pradeep Mittal allowed five State appeals and set aside single-judge orders that had quashed recoveries of up to Rs 15.8 lakh from ministerial staff of the Madhya Pradesh Police, holding that employees who kept an erroneous ad hoc increase under court stays from 2006 to 2018 cannot invoke Rafiq Masih, and t
The Aurangabad Bench held that Maharashtra, which sat on university proposals to sanction posts for over a decade while directing yearly temporary appointments, must treat the posts as deemed approved, regularise the teaching and non-teaching staff of the Ghansawangi and Hingoli Model Colleges, and pay arrears for three years before the petitions were filed.
A division bench of Chief Justice Harish Tandon and Justice Murahari Sri Raman allowed 15 writ appeals by SC and ST engineers, revenue inspectors, doctors and health workers, holding that the single judge who quashed the State clarification on own-merit promotion across 64 writ petitions had no occasion to consider the June 2019 report quantifying inadequate
A division bench of Justice Navin Chawla and Justice Ravinder Dudeja set aside the 2004 murder conviction of casual worker Shashi Kumar Nair, finding that the lone eyewitness account of a stabbing at a wedding function attended by up to 200 guests did not inspire confidence, that the extra-judicial confession and dying declaration rested on one unsupported w
Chief Justice A. Muhamed Mustaque held that the Union cannot seek certiorari against an award passed by its own Collector, but that a composite award combining the Section 23 valuation with Section 30 solatium forecloses the Section 36 revisional power and cannot be enforced. The Rs 150 per sq ft rate for 102 hectares in Lachen, Lachung and Chungthang must n
Nine years after a Dhanbad sessions court sentenced the brother of the husband and his wife to seven years, a division bench of Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad and Justice Pradeep Kumar Srivastava found that every witness put the kerosene and the matchstick in the hands of the mother-in-law and the husband alone, that no dowry demand or cruelty was specifically
A division bench found the last-seen witnesses unreliable, the ransom-call recording unproved, the recovery of the body tainted by a stock panch and the fathers prior disclosure of the spot, and the SIM evidence bare of call records or a Section 65B certificate, and acquitted Manishprasad Gaud of murder, kidnapping and destroying evidence.
Justice Amitendra Kishore Prasad quashed the 2018 dismissal of Y.K. Soloman, who had asked from Central Jail Ambikapur that his departmental enquiry wait until his murder trial ended and was instead recorded as having no defence, but held that his later acquittal on benefit of doubt gave him no automatic right to his job and left the CRPF free to start a fre
Justice Madhu Jain dismissed Rajkumar appeal against his conviction under Sections 7 and 13(1)(d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act for taking Rs 500 from a provident fund claimant in a January 2003 CBI trap, holding that demand and conscious acceptance were proved by the complainant, the shadow witness, the recovery and pink hand washes, and that an objec
Justice Samit Gopal suspended the sentences of Mohd Azam Khan and Mohd Abdullah Azam Khan, who have spent over four years and three and a half years in custody in a fixed-term case, but held that their criminal antecedents left no justifiable reason to stay the convictions that keep them out of the coming Assembly election, and admitted the revisions for fin
Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav held that documents lying in a plaintiff own godown throughout are not subsequently discovered documents under Sudhir Kumar, that a company cannot step outside Order XI Rule 1(5) CPC by deferring a search of its own records, and that the Diwali cleaning story was untrue and illogical when the first page of the same sales acc
A division bench at Srinagar held that the Jammu and Kashmir Water Resources Act, 2010, to the extent it levies water usage charges on hydro projects, imposes a tax on generation that the erstwhile State legislature had no competence to levy, struck it down to that extent and quashed demand notices against thirteen independent power producers.
A division bench of Justice Avneesh Jhingan and Justice Shail Jain partly allowed MMTC Ltd appeal against an ICA majority award in favour of Australian exporter Aust Grain, severing 9 per cent interest on a USD 271,950 performance guarantee that the contract itself said would carry no interest, while rejecting every other objection, including that the dissen
A division bench of Justice Sujit Narayan Prasad and Justice Pradeep Kumar Srivastava upheld the Ranchi Family Court, holding that a husband who admitted he stopped paying rent on the flat where his wife and two daughters lived had proved neither cruelty nor desertion under Section 13(1) of the Hindu Marriage Act.
Justice Amitendra Kishore Prasad quashed a governing body resolution of the Government Bilasa Girls Post Graduate College that refused to correct the records of a graduate whose marriage had been annulled, holding under Jigya Yadav that an autonomous college cannot treat the absence of a rule as a prohibition when a Family Court decree, a gazette notificatio
Justice Pankaj Bhatia held at Lucknow that keeping Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya teachers for more than 15 years on 11-month-29-day contracts at an honorarium below semi-skilled wages violates Articles 14 and 23, directed the State to sanction posts and frame service conditions within four months, and ordered Rs 17,000 a month to every KGBV teacher in the
Justice Ramesh Chand Malviya reversed a Begusarai probate grant for a 1994 will by which an elderly childless widow left her entire estate to two nieces. Nine days before the will she had signed a police complaint that her signature and mark had been taken on blank papers at a registry office. The will bore only thumb impressions at the top of each page, eve
Justice Rakesh Kainthla dismissed a second appeal pending since 2008 by purchasers who bought part of a Una plot from the vendor on the very day a specific performance suit was filed against her. Reading the High Court Rules on the court petition box, the judge held the plaint was presented by 10.15 am, so both sales were pendente lite, Section 19(b) of the
A division bench of Justice Vivek Singh Thakur and Justice Bhupesh Sharma dismissed the State appeal against the 2018 acquittal of three men stopped in a Mahindra Xylo at Dohri Diwar, Solan. Both independent witnesses denied seeing the recovery, the police officers contradicted each other on where the secret information was received and where the bag was ope
Justice Sushil Kukreja refused to reject a Rs 6.36 crore mortgage suit by a real estate company, holding that a one-off loan with no mercantile document, made by a company that is not a banker, trader or financier, falls outside Section 2(1)(c)(i) of the Commercial Courts Act even if it carries interest and funded a housing project.
