Few eviction grounds are litigated as hard as unlawful sub-letting. The tenant insists the stranger behind the counter is a partner, an employee, or a licensee; the landlord insists possession has been quietly sold off. The Karnataka Rent Act, 1999 resolves the contest through a single eviction ground — a tenant who has, without the landlord's written consent, sub-let, assigned or otherwise parted with possession of the whole or any part of the premises faces eviction. This note locates that ground precisely in the statute, maps its three limbs, and threads through the Supreme Court learning on exclusive possession, the shifting burden of proof, and the favourite tenant defence — the genuine partnership.

Locating the sub-letting ground in the statute

A word of precision at the outset. The unlawful sub-letting eviction ground in the Karnataka Rent Act, 1999 is housed in Section 27(2)(b), not in a clause lettered (d). Clause (b) permits eviction where the tenant has — (i) on or after the application of Part V of the old Karnataka Rent Control Act, 1961 but before this Act applied to the area, or (ii) after the commencement of this Act without the consent in writing of the landlord — sub-let, assigned or otherwise parted with the possession of the whole or any part of the premises. (Clause (d), by contrast, deals with non-occupation of the premises for six months, and clause (c) with change of user.) The penalty machinery confirms the home of the ground: the Act's penal clause punishes a tenant who sub-lets, assigns or parts with possession “in contravention of the provisions of clause (b) of sub-section (2) of section 27.” This note therefore proceeds on Section 27(2)(b)(ii), the live ground for tenancies created under the 1999 Act. For the statutory architecture, read the introduction alongside the other eviction grounds.

The three limbs: sub-letting, assignment, parting with possession

Section 27(2)(b) is not one act but three, deliberately cast in the disjunctive. Sub-letting is the creation of a sub-tenancy — the tenant becomes a sub-landlord, parting with possession of part or whole for a consideration while retaining the head tenancy. Assignment is the outright transfer of the tenant's leasehold interest to a third party, who steps into the tenant's shoes. Otherwise parting with possession is the residual, broadest limb: it captures any handing over of exclusive possession that is neither a formal sub-lease nor an assignment but achieves the same practical result. The Karnataka legislature's choice of three overlapping phrases is purposeful — it forecloses the argument that a transaction escapes the section merely because it does not fit the technical mould of a sub-lease. What unites all three is the surrender of possession to a stranger to the tenancy without the landlord's written sanction. The word “possession,” as the cases show, means exclusive possession; mere permissive user, sharing, or a licence that leaves the tenant in legal control does not engage the clause. The disjunctive drafting also matters for pleading: a landlord need not pin his case to one limb at the outset, because the same set of facts — a stranger in sole occupation for consideration — may satisfy whichever limb the evidence ultimately fits. An assignment, being an out-and-out transfer of the leasehold, leaves the tenant with nothing; a sub-letting leaves him a reversion; a parting with possession may leave him a bare paper title. But for the purposes of Section 27(2)(b) the eviction consequence is identical in all three, and the courts have consistently refused to let a tenant defeat the ground by quarrelling over which technical label fits the impugned arrangement.

The clause turns on the absence of “the consent in writing of the landlord.” Oral permission, acquiescence, or even long silence does not satisfy the statute for post-commencement transactions — the consent must be written and, under the companion provision in Section 32(2), previous, i.e. obtained before the sub-letting. The Act reinforces this in Section 32, the “restriction on sub-letting” provision, which forbids a tenant from sub-letting or assigning without the previous written consent of the landlord, and in Section 32(3), which bars the landlord from extracting premium or pugree as the price of that consent. Sections 33 and 34 complete the scheme: Section 33 requires notice of the creation and termination of a lawfully created sub-tenancy, and Section 34 elevates a lawful sub-tenant to the status of a direct tenant of the landlord on the determination of the head tenancy. The statutory message is that sub-letting is not forbidden — only unauthorised sub-letting is. A tenant who follows the written-consent route in Sections 32 and 33 creates a protected sub-tenancy; a tenant who bypasses it invites a decree under Section 27(2)(b).

Exclusive possession: the central fact

The factual fulcrum of every sub-letting case is exclusive possession. The classic exposition is Associated Hotels of India Ltd. v. R.N. Kapoor, AIR 1959 SC 1262, where the Supreme Court drew the line between a lease and a licence: if a document creates an interest in property entitling the transferee to exclusive possession, it is a lease, whatever label the parties attach; if it only permits another to use the property while legal possession remains with the owner, it is a licence. Exclusive possession is “the most important indication” in favour of a tenancy, though not by itself conclusive. Transposed to sub-letting, the question becomes whether the third party holds the premises to the exclusion of the tenant. Where the tenant continues to control and use the premises and merely shares them, no sub-tenancy arises. Where the tenant has effaced himself and a stranger sits in sole command, the inference of sub-letting becomes available. The same Court in Associated Hotels of India Ltd. v. S.B. Sardar Ranjit Singh, AIR 1968 SC 933, applied the test in an eviction setting, confirming that exclusive possession by the occupant for consideration is the hallmark the landlord must establish. The enduring value of R.N. Kapoor is its insistence on substance over form: the four indicia it laid down — the intention of the parties, the creation of an interest in the property, the right to exclusive possession, and the surrounding circumstances — are still the grid through which Karnataka Controllers test whether a so-called “leave and licence” or “conducting agreement” is in truth a disguised sub-tenancy. Where the document grants exclusive possession, the nomenclature chosen by the parties to escape the rent law is brushed aside. This substance-over-form approach is the connective tissue between the lease-licence learning and the sub-letting cases that follow.

The burden of proof and how it shifts

Sub-letting is, by nature, clandestine; the tenant and the stranger rarely reduce their bargain to writing or pay rent across a counter. Indian law accommodates this reality through a calibrated burden. The initial onus lies on the landlord, but it is a light initial onus: the landlord need only prove that a third party is in exclusive possession and that the tenant has gone out of possession. In Bharat Sales Ltd. v. Life Insurance Corporation of India, (1998) 3 SCC 1, the Supreme Court held that since payment of consideration is usually secret, the law does not require it to be proved by affirmative evidence; the court may draw an inference of sub-letting from the proven fact of delivery of exclusive possession to a stranger. Once the landlord establishes those two foundational facts, a presumption of unlawful sub-letting arises and the onus shifts to the tenant to explain the lawful character of the third party's possession. This shifting framework was reaffirmed in the Karnataka-specific decision M.V. Ramachandrasa v. Mahendra Watch Company, 2026 INSC 348, decided squarely under Section 27(2)(b)(ii) of this Act, where the original partner had vanished around 2000 and strangers ran the watch business in sole command.

The two ingredients distilled

The most cited modern restatement is Celina Coelho Pereira v. Ulhas Mahabaleshwar Kholkar, (2010) 1 SCC 217. The Supreme Court distilled the ground to two ingredients that the landlord must, in substance, establish: first, parting with possession of the tenancy or part of it by the tenant in favour of a third party with an exclusive right of possession; and second, that such parting was without the landlord's consent and in lieu of compensation or rent. Crucially, the Court explained the evidentiary route: the landlord's initial burden stands discharged by adducing prima facie proof that a person other than the tenant was in exclusive possession; a presumption of sub-letting then arises and amounts to proof unless rebutted by the tenant. Consideration need not be proved by direct evidence — it may be inferred. Celina Coelho thus marries the substantive ingredients to the procedural burden, and is the case most courts in Karnataka turn to first when sizing up a Section 27(2)(b) plea. Read it against the statutory definitions of tenant and landlord, which fix who may grant and who may breach.

The partnership defence and lifting the veil

The tenant's stock answer to a sub-letting charge is that the occupant is a partner, not a sub-tenant. The leading authority is Helper Girdharbhai v. Saiyed Mohmad Mirasaheb Kadri, (1987) 3 SCC 538, where the Supreme Court held that a tenant who becomes a partner in a firm and lets the firm trade from the premises, while himself retaining legal possession and control, does not sub-let. Whether the partnership is genuine must be judged on the facts of each case by the ordinary principles of partnership law. But the defence is not a magic incantation. As Celina Coelho and the Karnataka decision in M.V. Ramachandrasa stress, where the tenant has divested himself of possession and a partnership deed is merely a cloak to collect the consideration for a disguised sub-tenancy, the court is not estopped from tearing the veil of partnership to reach the real transaction. The decisive question is always control: if the original tenant has genuinely retained user and command of the premises, the partnership stands; if he has effaced himself and strangers run the show, the veil falls and Section 27(2)(b) bites.

Licence, sharing and permissive user are not sub-letting

Because the ground requires exclusive possession to pass to the stranger, arrangements that leave the tenant in legal control fall outside it. A bare licence — a permission to use the premises without an interest in them — does not amount to parting with possession, as the lease-versus-licence distinction in R.N. Kapoor makes clear. So too with a tenant who installs an employee, agent, or relative to run the business on the tenant's behalf, or who shares the premises while retaining the keys and the trade. The accommodation of a guest, a servant, or a family member is not sub-letting; nor is the carrying on of business by a firm of which the tenant is a working partner. The dividing line is not the presence of a third party on the premises but the quality of that presence — whether it is to the exclusion of the tenant and for consideration. Where the third party's occupation is referable to the tenant's own continuing possession, the clause is not attracted, however irritating the landlord may find the arrangement. The practical evidentiary markers a Controller looks for are telling: who deals with the landlord and pays the rent, whose name appears on the trade licence and statutory registrations, who is found on the premises during inspection, and whether the original tenant retains a key, a stake, and a presence. A tenant who can show that he still trades, still pays, and still controls the premises — even alongside a relative or a working partner — defeats the charge; a tenant who has vanished from the scene while a stranger draws the income cannot. The clause polices the transfer of dominion, not the mere sharing of space.

Trial of the issue and the limits of revision

Whether premises have been unlawfully sub-let is overwhelmingly a question of fact, tried before the Controller and the appellate authority on oral and documentary evidence. The findings of those fact-finding fora carry weight. In Puri Investments v. Young Friends & Co., 2022 LiveLaw (SC) 279, the Supreme Court underscored that a High Court exercising supervisory jurisdiction under Article 227 of the Constitution cannot reappreciate evidence like an appellate body; it may interfere only where the findings are perverse, arbitrary, or based on no evidence. For tenants and landlords litigating a Section 27(2)(b) eviction in Karnataka, the practical lesson is that the battle is won or lost on the facts found at the Controller and appellate stages — exclusive possession, the absence of the tenant, the genuineness of any partnership — and that the revisional court will not lightly disturb a reasoned finding. Sub-letting sits alongside the Act's other contested grounds; see the survey of eviction of tenant grounds and the broader scheme at the Karnataka Rent Act hub.

Consequences of an unlawful sub-letting

The primary consequence is eviction. Once the ground is made out under Section 27(2)(b), the tenant — and with him the sub-tenant, who has no independent shield against the landlord — loses the premises. An unlawful sub-tenant gets none of the protection that Section 34 confers on a lawful one; he cannot claim to become a direct tenant of the landlord because the foundation, a lawfully created sub-tenancy with written consent, is missing. The Act adds a penal dimension: a tenant who sub-lets, assigns or parts with possession in contravention of Section 27(2)(b) is punishable with a fine, the quantum keyed to the rent received for the sub-letting. The combined effect of eviction, the absence of protection for the sub-tenant, and the penal exposure is to make unauthorised sub-letting a genuinely costly course. The lawful path — written, previous consent under Section 32 and notice under Section 33 — remains open and is the only safe one.

Frequently asked questions

Is the sub-letting eviction ground in Section 27(2)(d) of the Karnataka Rent Act, 1999?

No. The unlawful sub-letting, assignment and parting-with-possession ground sits in Section 27(2)(b). Clause (d) deals with non-occupation of the premises, and clause (c) with change of user. The Act's own penal provision confirms this by punishing contraventions of “clause (b) of sub-section (2) of section 27.”

Does sub-letting always require the landlord's consent in writing?

Yes, for tenancies under the 1999 Act. Section 27(2)(b)(ii) and Section 32 require the landlord's previous, written consent. Oral permission, acquiescence or silence does not protect the tenant. A sub-tenancy created with written consent is lawful and attracts the protection of Sections 33 and 34.

Who has to prove sub-letting, the landlord or the tenant?

The initial onus is on the landlord, but it is light. As Bharat Sales Ltd. v. LIC, (1998) 3 SCC 1, and Celina Coelho Pereira, (2010) 1 SCC 217, hold, once the landlord proves a third party in exclusive possession and the tenant out of possession, a presumption of sub-letting arises and the onus shifts to the tenant to explain the lawful nature of that possession.

Does inducting a business partner amount to sub-letting?

Not if the partnership is genuine and the tenant retains legal possession and control, per Helper Girdharbhai v. Saiyed Mohmad Mirasaheb Kadri, (1987) 3 SCC 538. But where the tenant has divested possession and the partnership deed is only a cloak for a disguised sub-tenancy, courts will lift the veil — as the Karnataka case M.V. Ramachandrasa, 2026 INSC 348, illustrates.

Is a licence or letting a relative use the premises the same as sub-letting?

No. Sub-letting requires the transfer of exclusive possession to a stranger for consideration. A bare licence, sharing, or accommodating a servant, agent or family member while the tenant keeps legal control does not amount to parting with possession. The lease-versus-licence test in Associated Hotels of India v. R.N. Kapoor, AIR 1959 SC 1262, governs the distinction.

Can a High Court reverse a finding of sub-letting on revision?

Only within narrow limits. Whether premises were sub-let is a question of fact for the Controller and appellate authority. Under Puri Investments v. Young Friends & Co., 2022 LiveLaw (SC) 279, a court exercising Article 227 supervisory jurisdiction cannot reappreciate evidence like an appellate body and may interfere only with perverse or arbitrary findings.