VISHNU AWATAR SMT KAUSHALYA DEVI KARAN SINGH Vs. SHIV AUTAR:SUSHILA DEVI:DESRAJ SINGH

JUDGEMENT

(1.) These petitions for special leave deserve to be dismissed because the Full Bench judgment of the Allahabad High Court which is challenged in all the three has been rightly decided in our view. Even so, a speaking order has become necessary because, as rightly pointed out by counsel, the earlier decision of this court in Vishesh Kumar v. Shanti Prasad, AIR 1980 SC 892 does not specifically cover the precise point that has been raised before us by counsel for the petitioner. We are concerned with the ambit and impact of S. 3 of the Code of Civil Procedure (Uttar Pradesh Amendment) Act, 1978 (for short, the Act), which forbids a revision under S. 115 of the Civil Procedure Code (acronymically, the C. P. C.) to the High Court from a judgment or order in appeal by the District Court where the suit out of which the case arises is not one of the value of Rs. 20,000 and above.

(2.) We have, in Vishesh Kumar v. Shanti Prasad, (supra) considered the scheme, setting and purpose of the U. P. Amendment to the Civil Procedure Code bearing on the revisory power of the High Court under S. 115, C. P. C. We may quote: A schematic analysis of the judicial hierarchy within a State indicates that the High Court, as the apex court in the hierarchy, has been entrusted, not only with the supreme appellate power exercised within the State but also, by virtue of S. 115, the power to remove, in order to prevent a miscarriage of justice, any jurisdictional error committed by a subordinate court in those cases where the error cannot be corrected by resort to its appellate jurisdiction. The two salient features of revisional jurisdiction under S. 115 are, on the one hand, the closely limited grounds on which the court is permitted to interfere and on the other, the wide expanse of discretion available to the court, when it decides to interfere, in making an appropriate order. The intent is that so serious an error as one of jurisdiction, if committed by a subordinate court, should not remain uncorrected, and should be removed and record healed of the infirmity by an order shaped to reinstate the proceeding within the proper jurisdictional confines of the subordinate court.

(3.) The crucial provision, S. 3 of the Act, reads thus: