The Bombay High Court has refused to add Gat No. 602 to a land ownership suit pending since 1995, holding that the proposed amendment was time-barred, lacked bona fides and could affect rights acquired by third-party purchasers in Karla village, Pune district.
Justice Sandeep V. Marne dismissed a writ petition filed by Subhadrabai Tukaram Kate against an April 23, 2018 order of the Vadgaon Maval civil court. The lower court had rejected an application seeking to amend the original plaint in the decades-old dispute.
The petitioner’s case was that the original suit had mistakenly mentioned Gat No. 612 instead of Gat No. 602. Senior Advocate Surel Shah, appearing for Kate, argued that correcting the survey number was a formal amendment needed to determine the actual dispute. He also submitted that the plaintiffs had not executed the disputed sale deeds and could seek declarations that the transactions were not binding on their ownership rights.
Shah relied on the Supreme Court’s decision in Shanti Devi v. Jagan Devi and argued that the proposed challenges should not be rejected as time-barred. He further contended that the suit was filed in 1995, before stricter amendment requirements were introduced into the Civil Procedure Code in 2002. Any delay, he said, could be addressed by imposing costs rather than refusing the amendment.
The respondents opposed the petition. Senior Advocate Anil Anturkar argued that the alleged survey-number error was inconsistent with the petitioners’ own records. The original plaint described the boundaries of Gat No. 612, while a 1994 application before the district collector also referred to Gat Nos. 583 and 612. The petitioners had additionally filed a 7/12 extract for Gat No. 612.
The respondents also pointed to an amendment application filed in 2013. That application challenged a December 2008 sale deed concerning Gat No. 583, even though the deed covered both Gat Nos. 583 and 602. Gat No. 602 was not included in that challenge. The respondents argued that attempts made in 2017 to challenge transactions executed between 2006 and 2008 were barred by limitation.
Justice Marne found that the documents relied upon by the petitioners made it difficult to accept that the repeated references to Gat No. 612 were merely an inadvertent typographical error. The court also noted that the petitioner had not disclosed the earlier 2013 amendment application in the writ petition.
The High Court placed particular emphasis on purchasers who had acquired portions of Gat No. 602 while that land was not part of the pending litigation. Adding the property after several decades, the court observed, would fundamentally change the dispute and could draw third-party purchasers into prolonged litigation and negotiations.
The court distinguished the Shanti Devi ruling, finding that the petitioners were seeking ownership of the entire property rather than protection of an established share in jointly owned land. It held that the proposed challenges to documents executed between 2006 and 2008 were not protected by the principle cited by the petitioner.
The High Court concluded that the amendments were time-barred and lacked bona fides. It rejected the argument that payment of costs could cure the delay, holding that a time-barred and non-bona fide amendment could not be allowed merely on that condition. The petition was dismissed without costs, while the original ownership dispute remains before the civil court.
