EXPERIENCE & LEARN

RAIYAT Section 2(10) – Raiyat means a person or an institution holding land for any purpose whatsoever. Person is defined in Section 3(42) of General Causes Act, 1987 “Person shall include any company or association or body of individuals whether incorporated or not.” V.K. Rao v. Special Collector – The SC observed the word institution includes religion, charitable or cultural institutions holding land. Section 2(7) – Land means land of every description and a raiyat holding land of every description has to hold it for any purpose whatsoever subject to the ceiling limit as prescribed in Chapter IIB of the Act. According to Section 14K (a) ceiling area means the maximum extent of land which a raiyat shall be entitled to own and if fixed with reference to the family of the raiyat. - A raiyat being adult unmarried person = 2.50 Hectares. - A raiyat who is a sole surviving member of a family = 2.50 Hectares. - A raiyat having a family consisting of 2 members but...

According to a positivist tradition, a law or a norm has a status of law if a recognized human authority declares it to be a law. Who do we say recognized human authority? Precisely, we are distinguishing it from spiritual, from a deity. The content of law from a positivist perspective is irrelevant. From positivist perspective what we are concerned is whether or not the law was enacted by the sovereign. Morality is irrelevant. So, the law is valid if the sovereign says it’s valid. For a law to be valid within the positivist tradition, a law must have the correct pedigree. What we mean by the pedigree is that the sovereign must follow the established procedures for law making. Positivist access the validity of law by asking two questions, Was the law created by the correct authority? Did the correct authority follow the appropriate procedures? A law is valid only if it is a YES to both the questions. The beginning of 19th Centiry might be taken as marking the begi...

Montesquieu said that law making was the job of the legislature, and taking administrative and a policy decision was the job of the executive.  This approach was in accordance with the positivist school of jurisprudence propounded by the British jurists Bentham and Austin , who placed the centre of gravity of the legal system on statutory law, that is, law made by the legislature. In contrast, sociological jurisprudence, which originated in Continental Europe in the late 19 th  century was developed in U.S.A. by Roscoe Pound , the realist school, etc. and sought to shift the centre of gravity in the legal system from statute to judge made law. Judicial review is the corner stone of constitutionalism. Constitutionalism denotes a constitution not only of powers but also restraints as well. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar , who chaired the drafting committee of our Constituent Assembly, had described the provision related to the same as the ‘heart of the Constitution’. ...

A basic shift in the approach to environmental protection occurred initially between 1972 and 1982. Earlier, the concept was based on the “ assimilative capacity ” rule  (Principle 6 of Stockholm Declaration, 1972) , which assumed that science could provide policy makers with the information and means necessary to avoid encroaching upon the capacity of the environmental to assimilate impacts and it presumed that relevant technical expertise would be available when environmental harm was predicted and there would be sufficient time to act in order to avoid such harm. Later, the emphasis shifted to the  “Precautionary Principle” (11 th  Principle of UN Resolution on World Charter for Nature, 1982) , and this was reiterated in the  Rio Conference of 1992  in its  Principle 15. The incorporation of precautionary principle is found in various international legal instruments. - The  Nineth Preambular Paragraph of the Convention on ...

People have always as a matter of necessity lived by rules. It does not matter where in the world; it does not matter in what age, whether the society in which they lived was a simple or a complex one by our present day standards. These rules are likely to be influenced by nature, society and by the natural instinct that everyone has for survival which may be influenced by religious or secular beliefs, and they will cater for the ideas of right and wrong that have been developed over time to time. If we think about our self, we form a club to include our friends, certainly the first thing will be to choose a leader and come up with some rules. As time goes, we may observe all the rules made by us do not work, and we will change and adapt them to suit our needs based on any new ideas which we may have, but without any rules we will not be able to manage at all. Even criminals who plan a crime works to a set of rules of their making, however unpleasant them and their cr...

Albert Einstein had learning impairments. Yet, he developed the Theory of Relativity which greatly affected the way of people view and understand the world today. Thomas Alva Edison has hearing impairment, but his invention Electricity is more responsible than anything else for creating the modern world we live in. They are people who proved that it is not disability but one’s ability that counts. There was a time when disability – physical or mental was considered a curse both on the family of the disabled person and the person himself. It was believed that it was God’s retribution for sins committed in previous birth. Thankfully, modern science has helped to clear such misapprehensions. Disability is not being accepted as a curable medical condition. The disabled are not longer expected to be treated as outcasts of society. Science and innovation has provided tools to supplement their disabilities. Awareness on their special educational needs is much more than earli...