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Hari Shankar Aggarwal v. The State of Rajasthan & Anr.

Criminal Appeal · 2021 INSC 176Decided 10 Mar 2021
Criminal Appeal No. 297 of 2021
Justice Ashok Bhushan · Justice S. Abdul Nazeer · Justice Hemant Gupta

Background

A complaint was filed under the Prevention of Food Adulteration Act, 1954 after a 2002 inspection found allegedly adulterated ghee traced to a food company. The complaint named Hari Shankar Aggarwal as a party based on information from the Commercial Tax Department, even though the complaint itself separately recorded that the Local Health Officer had identified a different person, Devendra Singh Bhadauria, as the company's actual nominated director under the Act. Aggarwal argued that paperwork formally nominating Bhadauria had been submitted to and received by the Chief Medical Officer in 1995, long before the trial court took cognizance against him, so he should never have been prosecuted. The trial court and the Rajasthan High Court had both rejected his plea to quash the proceedings against him.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court examined the complaint's own paragraphs and found they were internally inconsistent: one paragraph named Aggarwal based on tax-department information, while another named Bhadauria based on the Local Health Officer's own records, which is what legally matters under Section 17 of the Act. The Court held that the statutory nomination process requires notice to the Local Health Authority, and the complaint's own averments confirmed that authority had been notified of Bhadauria, not Aggarwal, as the responsible person. It rejected the State's objection that the nomination letter was invalid for being on the company's letterhead or filed before formal incorporation, since the Form VIII nomination was duly received by the Health Officer. Finding no specific allegation against Aggarwal beyond this mistaken identification, the Court held cognizance against him was erroneous and set aside the orders of both the trial court and the High Court, allowing the appeal.

Lesson Learnt

In regulatory/criminal prosecutions of companies, liability attaches to the person actually and validly nominated as responsible under the statute's own notice procedure, being named by an unrelated department's records, where the complaint's own documents point to someone else as the properly nominated person, is not enough to sustain a prosecution.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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