Smt. Ved Kumari (Dead, through LR Dr. Vijay Aggarwal) vs Municipal Corporation of Delhi
Background
Ved Kumari had leased land in Delhi to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) in 1973 for ten years; when the lease expired in 1983 and MCD refused to hand the land back, she won a decree for possession in 1990. Over the following decades, MCD resisted actually handing over the land: first citing the hardship to about 400 schoolchildren whose school stood on the land, then claiming it was acquiring the land, and finally, in 2009, claiming for the first time that the land had been encroached upon by unknown third parties and was no longer in its possession. The Executing Court eventually accepted MCD's claim and closed the execution proceedings as "inexecutable," a decision the Delhi High Court upheld.
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court held that a judgment-debtor cannot simply escape a decree by claiming, decades later, that a third party has encroached upon the property: the proper procedure under Order XXI Rules 97 to 101 of the Code of Civil Procedure is for the Executing Court to actually adjudicate any resistance or claim by such a third party, not to declare the decree unenforceable outright. Since no stranger had ever actually come forward resisting delivery of possession, the Executing Court had no basis to close the proceedings. The Court set aside the High Court's and Executing Court's orders and directed the Executing Court to proceed with delivering physical possession to the decree-holder as per the Code's procedure.
Lesson Learnt
A person or authority ordered by a court to hand over property cannot indefinitely defeat that order simply by later claiming someone else is now occupying the land. The law requires the actual claim of any third party to be properly examined and adjudicated before an execution can be treated as impossible to carry out.