Dalip Singh and Others v. State of Haryana and Others
Background
In 1984, an industrial plot in Panchkula was allotted at a concessional rate to Rabinder Nath, managing director of a dairy and oil mills firm, on condition that construction and production begin within two years. Production never started, and after the allottee's death his legal heirs (the appellants) also failed to build or produce anything on the plot for roughly twenty years. HUDA issued a show-cause notice in 2003 and resumed (cancelled) the plot in 2004, forfeiting 10% of the money paid; the heirs' appeal and revision against this were dismissed, as was their subsequent writ petition before the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court upheld the resumption, noting that every authority and the High Court had concurrently found the twenty-year non-compliance to be a real breach of the allotment's core purpose, generating industrial activity and employment, not a minor technicality. The appellants' excuses (lost documents, the original allottee's and his widow's illness) were rejected because the only formal response to the show-cause notice never even mentioned the illness, and the delay of twenty years went far beyond anything the cited precedents (where resumption was held to be an unjustified "extreme step") had excused. The Court also rejected the plea that the appellants be allowed to simply pay the present market value to keep the plot, since allotment and resumption are governed by a specific statutory policy, not private negotiation, and rejected reliance on other cases where resumption was set aside as factually different. Courts can only interfere with a resumption order if the authority acted outside its powers or against procedure, which was not shown here, so the appeal was dismissed.
Lesson Learnt
Government land or industrial plots allotted at concessional rates come with binding conditions (such as timelines to build and produce), and prolonged, unexplained non-compliance, even across generations of the same family, can validly result in permanent cancellation; courts will not rewrite statutory land policy out of sympathy alone.