M/S Raghav Construction v. The State f Bihar

that there is no dispute with regard to petitioner having done the extra work. The liability to pay is being disputed only because prior to giving orders to the petitioner for doing extra work, certain formalities were not complied with by the State Officer. In my view, is a question of indoor management. A contractor is not supposed to look into the government procedures and files and ensure whether all internal procedures are followed or not. Additional work having been assigned by Executive Engineer, the direction being there and the work having been done, the liability can not be denied. It is well settled, that no work is gratuitous. If - 4 - this is permitted then all governmental work would be done in such an irregular manner and at the time of payment, payments would be denied. Thus leading to unjust enrichment on the part of the government, who would be benefited from the work and not have pay for it. That surely is not the law. All that I can do is to refer from a very old judgment in the case of All India Groundnut Syndicate Ltd., Assessee v. Commr. of Income Tax, Bombay City reported in AIR 1954 Bombay page 232 wherein Chief Justice Chagla said thus: “But the most surprising contention is put forward by the Department that because their own officer failed to discharge his statutory duty, the assessee is deprived of his right which the law has given to him under sub-section (2) of Section 24. In other words, the Department wants to benefit from and wants to take advantage of its own default. It is an elementary principle of law that no the Income-tax person—we Department is included in that definition— can put forward his own default in defence to a right asserted by the other party. A person cannot say that the party claiming the right is deprived of that right because “I have committed a default and the right is lost because of that default.” In the present case, what is stated in the counter- affidavit is that he did the work, but my officer committed some mistake somewhere, because of that mistake - 5 - committed by my officer the petitioner shall not be paid. There can not be anything more arbitrary than this for the State. It can not be now disputed that even on the contractual matters State is bound under Article 14 of the Constitution. Thus State is bound to comply with Article 14 and this case exemplifies violation thereof. I, therefore, allowed the writ application, set aside the directions issued not to make payment to the petitioner and direct that to the extent, as admitted by the Executive Engineer, the payment will have to be made to the petitioner for the extra work, within one month from today. In case government finds that the order was given unauthorizedly or in breach of government rules or regulations, Government would be free to realize the same from the concerned Executive Engineer but that would not delay the payment to the petitioner. The payment would be ensured within one month from today by concerned the Executive Engineer. The writ application is accordingly disposed of. Vikash/- (Navaniti Prasad Singh, J.)