Urvashiben & Anr. v. Krishnakant Manuprasad Trivedi
Background
The respondent sued the appellants' predecessor-in-title for specific performance of a 1992 agreement to sell land, filing the suit in 2017, more than 25 years later, and claiming he only learned in May 2017 that the land had meanwhile been sold to a third party. The trial court rejected the plaint outright as hopelessly time-barred under Order VII Rule 11 CPC, but the Gujarat High Court reversed that and allowed the suit to proceed to trial. The buyers' heirs (appellants) then appealed to the Supreme Court, arguing the suit was obviously filed far too late to be entertained.
Decision Breakdown
The Court held that where an agreement to sell does not fix a specific date for performance, the three-year limitation period under Article 54 of the Limitation Act, 1963 begins only from the date the plaintiff is actually notified that performance is being refused, and whether that notice genuinely occurred only in 2017, as claimed, is a disputed question of fact that can only be resolved through trial evidence, not decided by looking at the plaint's averments alone. Since a plaint can be rejected as time-barred under Order VII Rule 11 only if its own averments clearly show it is out of time, and here they did not, the Court dismissed the appeals and left the matter to be decided at trial, including the limitation question itself, expressing no view on the merits.
Lesson Learnt
A lawsuit cannot be thrown out at the very first stage as "time-barred" merely because it was filed long after the original contract date: if the contract fixed no deadline and the plaintiff claims they learned of the refusal to perform only recently, that claim must be tested by evidence at trial rather than assumed to be false.