ValkyaEditorial
Supreme Court

Rajat Kumar v. S D Adarsh Jain Kanya Maha Vidyalaya (2026): a High Court cannot grant relief never prayed for, nor reverse concurrent decrees without framing Section 100 CPC questions

Setting aside a Punjab & Haryana High Court judgment for the second time, the Supreme Court held that a court cannot substitute valuer-assessed compensation for a decree of mandatory injunction that was never sought, cannot direct an Executing Court to 'assess' a value once the underlying decree is gone, and cannot dispose of a second appeal without actually framing and answering substantial questions of law under Section 100 CPC.

Valkya Editorial· Legal Intelligence··7 min read
Court
Supreme Court of India
Citation
2026 INSC 648; Civil Appeal Nos. 19552-19553 of 2017
Neutral citation
2026 INSC 648
Bench
S.V.N. Bhatti, J., Atul S. Chandurkar, J.
Decided
19 June 2026

On 19 June 2026, a Bench of Justices S.V.N. Bhatti and Atul S. Chandurkar (who authored the opinion) decided Rajat Kumar & Ors. v. S D Adarsh Jain Kanya Maha Vidyalaya Sadhaura & Anr. (2026 INSC 648), allowing appeals by the legal heirs of a plaintiff whose two hard-won decrees had been dissolved twice over by the Punjab & Haryana High Court. The judgment is a compact restatement of two elementary but frequently blurred disciplines of civil procedure: a court gives the relief that was asked for, and a second appeal is decided on questions of law that are framed and answered.

The facts

The original plaintiff, Om Parkash, fought two civil suits against the respondents over an encroaching wall and a lintel. In Civil Suit No. 426 of 1996 he sought a mandatory injunction to remove a wall the defendants had raised on the common open space beyond his house, together with a permanent injunction against further construction. The Trial Court decreed that suit on 6 February 2006, directing removal of the encroaching walls and restraining further construction. The defendants' first appeal, Regular Civil Appeal No. 137 of 2006, was dismissed on 5 September 2007, and the decree stood.

In the second matter, Civil Suit No. 148 of 2000, the plaintiff sought a mandatory injunction to remove the lintel of the school building that the defendants had erected on the wall of his house. The Trial Court decreed that suit on 8 November 2004, directing removal of the lintel and restraining any repetition. That decree, too, survived the first appellate stage, and the defendants carried both matters up as Regular Second Appeals Nos. 363 and 364 of 2008.

By a judgment dated 25 November 2011 the High Court did something the plaintiff had never asked it to do. Instead of removing the encroachments, it directed the defendants to pay ₹10,000 (in the wall suit) and ₹7,000 (in the lintel suit), each with interest at 12% per annum — roughly half the expenditure the defendants had incurred on the construction — and held that, on such payment, the wall would be treated as "common" between the parties.

The first remand

The plaintiff's legal heirs challenged that reversal, and on 13 September 2013, in Civil Appeal Nos. 8203 and 8281 of 2013, the Supreme Court set aside the High Court's second-appeal judgments. Its objection was twofold: the High Court had modified the concurrent decrees "without entering into the merits of the controversy," and it had done so without framing any substantial questions of law. The matters were remanded for fresh consideration in accordance with law.

The second error

On remand, the High Court repeated itself in a different key. Observing that the construction was old, that there was no valuation report on record, and that the plaintiff's claim had not been proved, it reasoned that the other party could be compensated in money to be assessed by a valuer. By a common judgment dated 2 May 2016 it directed the Executing Court to assess the value of the construction, ordered the defendants to deposit that sum for payment to the legal heirs, and again set aside the Trial Court decrees as affirmed in first appeal. The heirs appealed a second time. The respondents did not appear before the Supreme Court at all after 23 April 2019.

What the Court held

Hearing only the appellants (through Ms. Sangeeta Kumar), the Court found the High Court had erred "on irrelevant considerations," and gave four connected reasons.

First, there was no prayer. The suits sought removal of the encroachment and the lintel; the plaintiff never claimed damages or compensation. In the absence of any such relief, the decrees in his favour could not be set aside by compelling his heirs to accept a valuer's figure — a course to which they had never consented.

Second, there was nothing left to execute. Once the decrees were set aside, there was no decree for the Executing Court to act upon, so directing it to assess a value was an exercise unsupported by any decree and outside Order XXI of the Code.

Once the decrees passed by the Trial Court in favour of the plaintiff were set aside, there would be no occasion for the Executing Court to proceed with the execution proceedings since there would be no decree holding the field for being executed.
— Atul S. Chandurkar, J.

Third, the High Court had already been corrected for precisely this move in 2013 and, on remand, "again committed the same error" — this time routing the compensation through the Executing Court rather than fixing it itself, but achieving the same forbidden result against a decree operating in the heirs' favour.

Fourth, the reasoning rested on a factual mistake and a procedural void. The High Court had assumed the Trial Court found the wall to be "common"; no such finding existed — the Trial Court had ordered the wall's removal. And although the High Court referred to three questions that the defendants urged it to treat as substantial questions of law, its order never actually treated them as such, yet concluded by "answering" them in the defendants' favour and setting aside the decrees.

Without an available question of law for consideration and also by making out a new prayer, the decrees passed in favour of the original plaintiff have been set aside. The legal heirs of the plaintiff have been required to accept monetary relief for which a prayer was never made. Such course has resulted in miscarriage of justice.
— Atul S. Chandurkar, J.

The disposition

Finding the High Court's judgment unsustainable, the Court set aside the common judgment dated 2 May 2016 in RSA Nos. 363 and 364 of 2008. Because the second appeals had never been adjudicated on their merits, there was "no option but to request the High Court to re-consider both the appeals in accordance with Section 100 of the Code and decide the same on their own merits." Noting that the appeals date back to 2008, the Court asked that they be taken up expeditiously. The civil appeals were allowed, with no order as to costs.

Why it matters

Strip away the modest sums and the neighbourly wall, and two transferable rules remain. A civil court adjudicates the reliefs pleaded; it cannot manufacture a new one — here, a compulsory sale of the encroachment for a valuer's price — and impose it on an unwilling decree-holder. And Section 100 is not a formality: a second appeal that disturbs concurrent findings must rest on substantial questions of law that are genuinely framed and answered, not merely gestured at and then treated as resolved. The added twist — a direction to an Executing Court to "assess" a value after the decree behind it was gone — is a reminder that execution presupposes a subsisting decree.

Sources

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