Land disputes in Gujarat's industrial belt have a way of outliving the people who started them, and the one decided by Justice Devan M. Desai on 14 October concerns roughly nine acres at Navagam village in Jamnagar that changed hands, on paper, four times across six decades before the courts finally drew a line under it. The plot now sits inside Reliance Industries' petroleum and petrochemicals SEZ, a roughly 10,000-acre project the Gujarat government assembled through a series of allotments beginning in 2008. This particular parcel's history, though, goes back to a very different purpose and a very different era.
The state had originally granted the land to one Deva Sajan Rabari in June 1962, on the condition ordinary to such grants of the period, for agricultural cultivation. Rabari did neither. He took no possession and raised no crop within the two years the grant required, and in December 1972 the authorities cancelled the allotment for exactly that default. Nobody contested the cancellation at the time, and nobody contested it for the following three decades either. Rabari himself never went back to court or to the revenue authorities to have the cancellation reviewed.
It was his legal heirs who moved, and they moved only in 2005, invoking a Government Resolution of 16 March 1982 that allowed re-grant applications in certain categories of cancelled land. The Collector rejected their application on 19 May 2006, pointing to the unexplained gap of well over three decades since the cancellation. That ought to have settled the matter, and for two years it did. Then, in April 2008, with the SEZ allotment to Reliance already made, the State's Special Secretary in the Revenue Department's Appeals wing set aside the Collector's rejection and ordered the restoration claim reconsidered, while separately turning down Reliance's request to be heard in those very proceedings.
Reliance challenged that reversal in the High Court, and the heirs' own parallel civil suit over the land was dismissed for default in 2010, a fact the Court treated as relevant background rather than decisive in itself. The core of Justice Desai's reasoning turns on an idea familiar to anyone who has argued a stale claim: a cancellation order that nobody challenges within a reasonable time, least of all the person it was passed against, attains finality, and that finality does not become open to question merely because his heirs develop an interest in the land decades later.
The appellate authority's 2008 order, on the Court's reading, never grappled seriously with that 33-year delay at all. It proceeded instead on an unsupported assertion that the land remained under cultivation, a claim the record did not bear out and one the original cancellation had already rejected back in 1972. Justice Desai also disposed of the argument, raised on behalf of the heirs, that pending litigation over the land should by itself have kept Reliance's allotment in suspension; the Court held that an allotment made by the competent authority to a third party does not fall simply because some dispute over the underlying title remains pending elsewhere.
Setting aside the 2008 appellate order restores the Collector's 2006 rejection, which means the re-grant claim stands finally refused and Reliance's allotment stands undisturbed. Senior Advocate Mihir Joshi appeared for Reliance; Assistant Government Pleader Rajvi Shah appeared for the State.
For anyone handling title or land-allotment disputes in Gujarat's industrial corridors, the practical lesson is less about Reliance and more about limitation by another name. A cancellation order left unchallenged by the person directly affected by it is treated as settled, and an appellate authority reviving such a claim decades later needs more than a bare assertion of continued possession to justify reopening it. Successor allottees who move in reliance on a government allotment are entitled to assume that history, once closed, stays closed absent a live challenge from the party who actually had standing to bring one.