A. Wilson Prince vs The Nazar & Ors.
Background
Rev. Salusbury Fynes Davenport, a man of substantial property, died in 1972 in Ooty leaving a Will executed in 1969 that named the firm M/s King and Partridge as executor. The firm's then senior partner obtained probate of the Will in 1972 and, by 1973, had filed the required inventory and final accounts with the court, apparently completing distribution of the estate with no objections at the time. Decades later, in 2016, one Smt. Mary Brigit (whose successors include the petitioner, A. Wilson Prince) sought a copy of the probate and, when refused, filed a writ petition in 2018 asking the court to direct that a copy of the Will and probate be furnished to her. It emerged that the original case records had been destroyed in 1998 under the Destruction of Records Act, 1917, and neither the executor's firm (after a thorough search) nor the district court could locate the original Will. The Madras High Court dismissed the writ petition, finding no direction could be issued to supply what no longer existed.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court dismissed the petition, agreeing the High Court had no way to grant the relief sought. It acknowledged that, in principle, an original probated Will ought to be preserved and not destroyed, and that it may have been mishandled (possibly returned to the executor per the practice of the time, possibly lost, or possibly destroyed in error) but after more than fifty years, it was impossible to establish which of these actually happened. The Court found it particularly significant that the writ petitioner (Smt. Mary Brigit) admitted in her own petition that she had never seen the Will or its contents, and only learned of the probate proceedings secondhand from a bank, decades after the fact, while still claiming to be a beneficiary. The Court described this as the petitioner going on "a treasure hunt, if not a wild goose chase," and held that courts cannot order an investigation into a lost document merely on the guesswork of someone who has never even seen it and cannot show any concrete stake in its contents.
Lesson Learnt
Courts cannot compel production of an old document, or order an inquiry into what happened to it, based purely on a claimant's suspicion or hope that they might be a beneficiary: a petitioner seeking such relief must first show some concrete basis for the claimed entitlement, not merely that a very old record has gone missing.