Entries made in 1990, revised suo motu in 2009: Gujarat HC restores the sale deed mutations

A revenue authority cannot reopen nineteen-year-old entries on a ground an appellate authority had already rejected, the Court holds, quashing the Collector’s cancellation.

Three revenue entries were posted in May 1990 on the strength of registered sale deeds. In 2009 the revenue authority took them up in suo motu revision. In August 2016 the Collector cancelled them. On 18 September 2026, in Jasumatiben Navaldas Dasani v. State of Gujarat, Justice Divyesh A. Joshi of the Gujarat High Court quashed that cancellation and directed the entries to be restored.

The judgment is about the limits of a revisional power that carries no express period of limitation, and about what happens when an authority exercises it a second time on a ground that has already failed.

A family, and a piece of land

Bavalal Jadavji had three sons: Harjivanlal, Nathalal and Bachulal. On his death on 13 April 1974 the land he owned was divided among the three brothers. Land bearing Survey Nos. 25 pk and 45 pk, situated in the sim of Village Jaspar, Taluka Jamkandorna, District Rajkot, fell to Nathalal’s share.

Nathalal had two children — a daughter, the first petitioner, and a son, Rameshbhai. What happened at the stage of mutating the succession entry is where the dispute begins.

The Court recorded that there is no dispute that the land held by Rameshbhai was ancestral property. On the settled position, at the time of mutating a succession entry the names of all legal heirs are required to be entered. The judgment records that the entry was made on the strength of a certificate issued by the Talati-cum-Mantri of Jaspar as to Rameshbhai’s status as an agriculturist, and that the first petitioner — the daughter — did not find her way into it.

Entry Nos. 4864, 4865 and 4866, dated 26 May 1990, were posted on the basis of registered sale deeds. Those are the entries the Collector cancelled twenty-six years later.

The same ground, twice

The procedural history carried the case. An order dated 16 September 2009 had been passed against the petitioner on the ground of a breach of Section 54 of the Saurashtra Gharkhed Tenancy Settlement and Agricultural Lands Ordinance, 1949 — the provision restricting transfers of agricultural land to non-agriculturists.

That order was quashed and set aside by the Special Secretary (Revenue Department, Appeals). Despite that, the entries were once again taken up in suo motu proceedings, and the order of 19 August 2016 now under challenge was passed on the very same ground of breach of the same provision.

Reading the two orders together, the Court held, made the difficulty plain: an authority whose order on a particular ground has been set aside in appeal cannot simply pass a fresh order on that ground as though the appellate decision had not happened.

Nineteen years is too long

The second ground is delay, and it is the one with the wider application.

The revenue authority exercised the power of suo motu revision in 2009 against entries posted in the revenue record in 1990. The Court set that interval against the line of authority on the exercise of revisional powers and limitation, and found the exercise unsustainable. Where a statute confers a revisional power without prescribing a period, the settled position is that it must be exercised within a reasonable time, and what is reasonable is measured against the disturbance to settled rights that reopening causes.

The Court also noted the admitted fact that a certificate had been issued by the Talati-cum-Mantri as to the agriculturist status of the first petitioner’s brother, and that the transactions proceeded on the strength of it. Where an official certificate was issued by the competent revenue functionary and acted upon by purchasers who paid under registered sale deeds, the case for reopening two decades later is correspondingly weaker.

Writ jurisdiction despite an alternative remedy

A recurring objection to petitions of this kind is that the revenue hierarchy provides its own remedies and the High Court should not be approached directly.

The judgment addresses it by reference to decisions which, though old, continue to hold the field: much water has since flowed beneath the bridge, the Court observed, but there has been no corrosive effect on them. The law as to the jurisdiction of the High Court to entertain a petition under Article 226 despite the existence of alternative statutory remedies is not affected — particularly in a case where the authority against whom the writ is filed is shown to have acted without jurisdiction.

That is the qualification that mattered here. The objection to the Collector’s order was not that he reached the wrong conclusion on the merits, but that he had no business reopening the entries at all — nineteen years after they were made, on a ground that had already been decided against the department in appeal.

What it settles for landholders

Mutation entries are not title, and revenue courts say so regularly. But they are what a purchaser, a lender and a successor actually rely on, and an entry that has stood for a generation acquires a practical weight that no disclaimer removes.

The judgment is useful for putting two constraints on the reopening of such entries in the same place. The first is temporal: a suo motu revisional power is not a power in perpetuity, and a gap measured in decades will not ordinarily survive scrutiny. The second is about finality: where an appellate authority has set aside an order on a given ground, the department cannot re-run the same ground in fresh proceedings.

For families in the position of these petitioners, there is a third point implicit in the facts. The irregularity the department was ultimately pursuing — a succession entry that omitted a legal heir on ancestral property — is real, and the judgment does not say otherwise. What it holds is that the way to address it was not to cancel, decades afterwards, entries made on registered sale deeds in favour of people who had relied on the record as it stood.

Order

The petition was allowed. The impugned order dated 19 August 2016 passed by the Collector was quashed and set aside, and Entry Nos. 4864, 4865 and 4866 dated 26 May 1990, based on registered sale deeds, were directed to stand restored in the revenue record. Rule was made absolute to that extent, and direct service was permitted.