Appeals to Rent Control Tribunal

The appellate architecture of the Chhattisgarh Rent Control Act, 2011 is unusual, and that very peculiarity made it the subject of a Constitution Bench ruling that every judiciary aspirant should know cold. The Act creates a dedicated statutory appellate body - the Chhattisgarh Rent Control Tribunal - to which a landlord or tenant aggrieved by the Rent Controller's order may appeal under Section 13(1). But the Act went further: Section 13(2) purported to send the next appeal straight to the Supreme Court of India, bypassing the High Court altogether. That provision was declared ultra vires the Constitution in Rajendra Diwan v. Pradeep Kumar Ranibala. This article maps the appellate ladder section by section, traces the constitutional reasoning that collapsed Section 13(2), and explains what remedy survives against a Tribunal order today.

The Statutory Appellate Scheme at a Glance

The 2011 Act establishes a two-tier adjudicatory structure. At the base sits the Rent Controller, a district-level authority who decides disputes between landlord and tenant - eviction applications, rent fixation, and recovery of possession. Above the Controller sits the Rent Control Tribunal, constituted by the State Government as the appellate forum. Section 13(1) confers the right of appeal: "a landlord and/or tenant aggrieved by any order of the Rent Controller shall have the right to appeal in the prescribed manner within the prescribed time to the Rent Control Tribunal." The appeal is thus a statutory right available to either side of the tenancy. The Tribunal hears the matter, may confirm, vary or set aside the Controller's order, and its decision is the final word within the four corners of the Act. The third tier the legislature imagined - a direct appeal to the Supreme Court under Section 13(2) - never lawfully came into being, as the rest of this article explains. To understand what kinds of orders feed into this ladder, read alongside Eviction of Tenant: Grounds and Standard Rent: Fixation and Revision.

Constitution of the Rent Control Tribunal: Article 323-B

The deliberate constitutional pedigree of the Tribunal is what gives this topic its bite. Section 6(1) directs that the State Government shall constitute a Tribunal in terms of Article 323-B of the Constitution, to be called the Chhattisgarh Rent Control Tribunal. Article 323-B is the constitutional source of power that authorises an appropriate legislature to set up tribunals for adjudication of disputes in enumerated matters - including, under clause (2)(g), "rent, its regulation and control and tenancy issues including the right, title and interest of landlords and tenants." By anchoring the Tribunal in Article 323-B, the State Legislature was operating within a recognised constitutional grant when it created the body itself. The drafting trouble lay not in creating the Tribunal but in where it routed the appeal from the Tribunal. Section 6(2) requires the State Government to appoint as Chairman a retired Judge of the High Court, or a serving or retired District Judge not below the Super Time Scale; Section 6 further provides for members, a Registrar of not below Civil Judge Class-I rank, and headquarters at Raipur with other notified sittings. The judicial calibre of the presiding officer reinforced the Tribunal's character as a substitute for ordinary civil-court adjudication.

The Right of Appeal under Section 13(1)

Section 13(1) frames the appeal as a right, not a discretionary indulgence. Either a landlord or a tenant - or both - aggrieved by "any order" of the Rent Controller may appeal to the Tribunal in the prescribed manner and within the prescribed time. The phrase "any order" is broad and, on its ordinary meaning, covers final orders of eviction, orders on rent fixation, and other substantive determinations rather than purely procedural directions. The limitation period and the form of the memorandum of appeal are left to the rules framed under the Act rather than fixed in the section itself, so a practitioner must consult the Chhattisgarh Rent Control Rules for the exact period of limitation and the fee. Because the appeal lies to a tribunal manned by a judicial officer of District Judge rank or above, it operates as a genuine first appeal on both facts and law, distinguishing it from the narrower supervisory review the High Court now exercises. In practice this means the Tribunal is competent to re-appreciate the evidence, re-examine findings on bona fide need or default in payment of rent, and substitute its own conclusion for that of the Controller - a width of review that the Article 227 jurisdiction described later in this article emphatically does not carry. A litigant who treats the Tribunal stage casually, on the assumption that errors can be cured higher up, therefore courts disaster: it is the last forum at which the merits are fully open. For the substantive grounds most frequently carried up on appeal, see Eviction of Tenant: Grounds.

Section 13(2): The Direct Appeal to the Supreme Court

The crux of the controversy is Section 13(2), which provided in plain terms: "Appeal against an order of the Rent Control Tribunal shall lie with the Supreme Court." On its face this was an extraordinary provision. It created a statutory right of appeal running directly from a State tribunal to the apex court of the nation, leapfrogging the High Court of Chhattisgarh entirely. No other rent-control statute in India had attempted to confer such a right. The legislative intent was presumably to give the parties a swift, single-stage route to finality without the delays of a High Court tier. The Bill had received the assent of the President - a fact the State leaned on heavily - and the State argued that this Presidential assent cured any want of competence. The validity of Section 13(2) was squarely tested when an evicted tenant, having lost before the Rent Controller and the Tribunal at Raipur, filed his appeal directly in the Supreme Court purporting to invoke this very provision. That appeal became Rajendra Diwan v. Pradeep Kumar Ranibala.

Rajendra Diwan v. Pradeep Kumar Ranibala: The Striking Down

In Rajendra Diwan v. Pradeep Kumar Ranibala (2019 SCC OnLine SC 1586, Civil Appeal No. 3613 of 2016, decided 10 December 2019), a five-Judge Constitution Bench - comprising Arun Mishra, Indira Banerjee, Vineet Saran, M.R. Shah and S. Ravindra Bhat, JJ., with the judgment authored by Indira Banerjee, J. - held Section 13(2) of the Chhattisgarh Rent Control Act, 2011 to be ultra vires the Constitution, null and void, and of no effect. The Court reasoned that the power to legislate with respect to the "constitution, organisation, jurisdiction and powers of the Supreme Court" is vested exclusively in Parliament under Entry 77 of List I (Union List). A State Legislature has no corresponding entry in List II or List III that would let it confer fresh appellate jurisdiction on the Supreme Court. Section 13(2), by purporting to create such an appeal, trenched upon a field reserved to Parliament alone and was therefore beyond the State's legislative competence. The Bench underscored that the Supreme Court's jurisdiction is delineated by the Constitution itself - principally Articles 132 to 136 - and supplemented only by laws Parliament is empowered to enact. To allow a State Legislature to add a fresh statutory appeal would be to let each State remodel the apex court's docket at will, fragmenting a jurisdiction the Constitution deliberately kept unified and national. The striking down was therefore not a technicality but a vindication of the federal scheme: the forum of last resort cannot be reconfigured by provincial enactment, however laudable the legislative aim of speedy finality might have been.

Article 138(2) and the 'Special Agreement' Argument

The State of Chhattisgarh sought refuge in Article 138(2), which permits the Supreme Court to exercise such further jurisdiction in respect of any matter as the Government of India and a State Government may, by special agreement, confer - if Parliament by law provides for the exercise of such jurisdiction. The Constitution Bench rejected the argument on two counts. First, Article 138(2) contemplates a special agreement between the Government of India and the State Government, an executive compact - not a unilateral State enactment. Second, even such an agreement is inert unless Parliament by law provides for the exercise of the conferred jurisdiction. Section 13(2) was neither a special agreement nor a Parliamentary law; it was a solitary State statutory provision. The Court was equally firm that Presidential assent cannot validate an enactment that exceeds the legislative competence of the State Legislature. Assent under Article 200 or 201 cures a repugnancy problem between a valid State law and a Union law on a Concurrent List subject; it cannot manufacture competence where none exists, nor breathe life into a provision that collides with an express constitutional allocation of power.

The Surviving Remedy: Article 227 to the High Court

With Section 13(2) excised, what remedy lies against an order of the Rent Control Tribunal? The answer is the High Court's constitutional jurisdiction. Because the appellate route the statute invented has fallen away, an aggrieved party must approach the High Court of Chhattisgarh by way of a petition under Article 227 (and, where appropriate, Article 226) of the Constitution. This is supervisory, not appellate: the High Court does not re-hear the dispute on merits as a regular second appeal but intervenes where the Tribunal has acted without jurisdiction, in breach of natural justice, or has committed a patent error of law apparent on the face of the record. The Chhattisgarh High Court has in practice entertained Article 227 petitions against Tribunal orders - for instance in disputes over whether open land falls within the Act's definition of "accommodation." The supervisory jurisdiction under Articles 226 and 227 is itself part of the basic structure and cannot be ousted by a State statute, which is precisely why it remains the live remedy. Beyond that, only the Supreme Court's own discretionary power under Article 136 (special leave) remains - but that is a constitutional discretion, not a statutory right the State could legislate into being.

Wider Significance for Federal Competence

The importance of Rajendra Diwan travels well beyond rent control. It is now a leading authority for the proposition that a State Legislature, however well-intentioned, cannot enact a law that enlarges, contracts or redirects the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. The decision draws a bright line around Entry 77 of the Union List and reaffirms that the apex court's jurisdiction is a matter of national constitutional design, not local convenience. For the student of constitutional law, it pairs naturally with the body of doctrine that Presidential or Gubernatorial assent goes to repugnancy under Article 254, never to competence. For the rent-law practitioner, the practical lesson is procedural but vital: never file an appeal in the Supreme Court relying on Section 13(2); the order to challenge is the Tribunal's, and the forum is the High Court under Article 227. Misreading the now-defunct provision can cost a litigant the limitation period for the correct remedy.

When Does the Appellate Mechanism Apply?

The appellate machinery only bites where the parent Act itself applies. The 2011 Act extends in the first instance to municipal areas comprising district headquarters and may be extended to other municipal areas by State notification, and it carves out exemptions for certain categories of premises. A dispute outside the Act's territorial or substantive sweep is not amenable to the Rent Controller's jurisdiction at all, and consequently the Section 13(1) appeal to the Tribunal never arises - the parties are remitted to the ordinary civil courts. For the contours of coverage and the carve-outs, read Application: Areas Covered and Exemptions. The threshold definitional questions - who is a "landlord," a "tenant," and what counts as "accommodation" - are dealt with in Definitions and frequently surface on appeal, because the Tribunal must first satisfy itself that the matter falls within the Act before confirming or reversing an eviction or a rent order.

Exam Takeaways

Three points anchor this topic for judiciary and CLAT-PG examinations. First, the appeal from the Rent Controller lies to the Rent Control Tribunal under Section 13(1), a body constituted under Article 323-B and headed by a judicial officer of District Judge rank or a retired High Court Judge under Section 6. Second, Section 13(2), which routed a further appeal directly to the Supreme Court, was struck down as ultra vires in Rajendra Diwan v. Pradeep Kumar Ranibala (2019) by a Constitution Bench, because only Parliament under Entry 77 List I may legislate on the Supreme Court's jurisdiction, and neither Article 138(2) nor Presidential assent could save it. Third, the surviving remedy against a Tribunal order is a supervisory petition under Article 227 (or Article 226) to the High Court of Chhattisgarh, with Article 136 special leave as the only residual route to the Supreme Court. Tie these to the substantive law in Eviction of Tenant: Grounds and the structural overview in the subject hub.