Use common wisdom to assess land value: Punjab and Haryana HC

Saurabh Malik

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 5

The Punjab and Haryana HC has ruled that a court was required to apply the wisdom of a common man while assessing the market value of the acquired land.

Justice Anil Kshetarpal has also made it clear that the courts were required to arrive at a figure “that a willing seller would get from a voluntary purchaser for the property”.

The ruling came on a bunch of 281 civil writ petitions and regular first appeals filed against the State of Haryana and other respondents by Nafe Singh and others. Justice Kshetarpal, among other things, ruled the Supreme Court had in more than one judgment recognised it would not be appropriate for the court to apply proportionate deduction to reduce the value, if there was no dissimilarity between the acquired land and the sale exemplar of a reasonable size/parcel of land.

Once the market value of the acquired agricultural land was being assessed and several sale exemplars of considerably big-sized plots of agricultural land were available, the application of cut/deduction for development was not justified. The exception was when the court was assessing the market value of land where the sale exemplars produced before the court were of relatively small-sized plots used for residential, commercial or industrial purposes. The deduction could be applied when comparable sale exemplar was of a plot of a smaller size as compared to the acquired land in order to moderate the difference between wholesale and retail prices as observed by the Supreme Court in judgment.