Madhya Pradesh High Court: In a case seeking review of an order of this particular Court by the petitioner, Rajeev Kumar Shrivastava, J., dismissed the same finding no ground to interfere in the original order.
The instant review petition has been filed under Order 47 Rule 1 of the Civil Procedure Code (CPC) for review of the order dated 08-09-2020 passed in Miscellaneous Appeal No. 470 of 2015 (Sharda Begum v. Kallu).
The facts, in brief, are such that the son of petitioner 1 and 2 lost his life in an accident. He was a truck driver and under the employment of respondent 2. Petitioners filed a claim before the Tenth Additional Motor Accident Claims Tribunal, Gwalior which passed an award of Rs 3,63,000 in Claim Case No. 143 of 2010 with interest in favour of the petitioners. Being unsatisfied with the award, the petitioners then filed an appeal before this Court for enhancement of the award amount. This Court by order date 08-09-2020 enhanced the amount to Rs 5,99,200.
Aggrieved with the said order, the present review petition has been preferred by the petitioners.
Counsel for the petitioners, Mahesh Haswani has submitted that the entire family of the deceased was dependent on him hence dependency should be assessed as 1/3rd but this Court has wrongly assessed the dependency as 1/2. Through the present review petition, the petitioners seek a modification in the impugned order to the extent of determining the dependency as 1/3rd and not 1/2 on the deceased.
Counsel for the respondents, Nirendra Singh vehemently opposed the petitioner’s submissions and prayed for the rejection of this petition.
The Court relied heavily on the judgments delivered in the cases of Board of Control of Cricket India v. Netaji Cricket Club, (2005) 4 SCC 741, Union of India v. Harinagar Sugar Mills Ltd., 2008 SCC OnLine Pat 1497 and Akhilesh Yadav v. Vishwanath Chaturvedi, (20130 2 SCC 1.
Upon careful consideration of the facts, circumstances and arguments advanced the Court observed that the scope of review by a civil court has been circumscribed by Section 114 of the CPC which provides that a review of an order is permissible upon the discovery of new and important matter of evidence. In the present case, nothing new has been brought before this Court by the petitioners. It is a well-settled position in law as reiterated in the case of Abhijit Tea Company (P) Ltd. v. Terai Tea Company (P) Ltd., 1994 SCC OnLine Cal 294 that only errors apparent on the face of record are liable to be reviewed and such errors must state one in the face where no elaborate arguments are necessary to pinpoint those errors.
The court also remarked that it is well settled that in the guise of review, a rehearing is not permissible. In order to seek review it has to be demonstrated that order suffers from error apparent on the face of record. The Court while deciding the application for review cannot sit in appeal over the judgment or decree passed by it. The review petitioner cannot be given liberty to readdress the Court on merits because it is not an appeal in disguise where the judgment/order is to be considered on merits.
While arriving at the above-stated observation, the Court referred the cases of S. Bagirathi Ammal v. Palani Roman Catholic Mission, (2009) 10 SCC 464 and State of West Bengal v. Kamal Sengupta, (2008) 8 SCC 612.
In view of the above, the review petition has been dismissed by this Court since the original order does not suffer from any error apparent that might warrant intervention.[Sharda Begam v. Kallu, 2020 SCC OnLine MP 2419, decided on 23-10-2020]
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