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The Kolhapur Municipal Corporation & Others vs. Vasant Mahadev Patil (Dead) Through LRs & Others

Civil Appeal · 2022 INSC 179Decided 14 Feb 2022
Civil Appeal No. 510 of 2022
M.R. Shah · B.V. Nagarathna

Background

A plot of land in Kolhapur owned by the respondents was reserved in the city's 1999 development plan for public purposes like parking, a garden, and a sewage treatment plant extension. When the Corporation failed to acquire the land for over a decade, the owners served a statutory notice in 2012 demanding acquisition; the Corporation passed a resolution to acquire it but never actually completed the acquisition, later citing an inability to pay the roughly Rs. 77 crore compensation and pointing out the land was flood-prone (crossed by the Jayanti Nala rivulet) and thus unsuitable for its reserved purpose. The Bombay High Court had directed the Corporation, by writ of mandamus, to go ahead and acquire the land and pay compensation, prompting the Corporation's appeal to the Supreme Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court held that under Section 127 of the MRTP Act, if a reservation is not acted upon within ten years and the landowner then serves a purchase notice, the reservation is deemed to lapse by operation of law if no genuine acquisition steps (such as a formal declaration) follow within a further year: merely passing a resolution or writing a letter to government authorities does not count as "taking steps," following the Court's own precedents in Girnar Traders and Shrirampur Municipal Council. Since the Corporation never issued the required declaration within that window, the reservation on this land had already lapsed, and once lapsed it cannot be revived by a court order compelling acquisition. The Court also independently held that a Corporation cannot be forced to acquire and pay huge compensation for land that is factually unsuitable/unusable for its reserved purpose (here, being flood-prone), and rejected the landowners' alternative request for Transferable Development Rights (TDR) since they had earlier expressly told the High Court they did not want TDR. The appeal was allowed, the High Court's mandamus was quashed, and the writ petition was dismissed.

Lesson Learnt

A government body's mere paperwork (a resolution, a letter, a budget line) does not count as "taking steps" to acquire land; if the statutory time limits lapse without real action, a land reservation dies by operation of law and cannot be revived by a court, and public authorities cannot be forced to acquire land that is genuinely unfit for the purpose it was reserved for.

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

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