The Patna High Court has dismissed a civil revision and affirmed the eviction of a couple from three rooms let to them by the wife’s sister on the ground of the landlady’s bona fide personal necessity. The Court held that in an eviction proceeding the court decides only whether a landlord-tenant relationship exists, not the question of title, which must be agitated in a separate suit; that a tenancy may be established by oral evidence; and that its revisional jurisdiction does not extend to reappreciating concurrent findings.
The Patna High Court has dismissed a writ petition by a State Bank of India officer challenging his reduction in grade, imposed after a disciplinary inquiry found he had sanctioned clean overdrafts beyond his powers, exposing the bank to a loss of about Rs 49.74 lakh. The Court held that a bank officer is held to a higher standard of honesty, that acting beyond one’s authority is misconduct irrespective of any eventual loss or recovery, and that the penalty was proportionate and not open to interference in judicial review.
Answering five questions referred by the Supreme Court, the Patna High Court has examined the remission and premature-release regime under the Bihar Prison Manual, 2012 and issued seventeen recommendations to make it transparent, time-bound and fair. It held the rules are not ‘absolutely selective’, but directed that every prisoner be given a duplicate History Ticket showing remission earned or forfeited, that no remission be seized without a hearing and reasons, and that an appeal and grievance mechanism be created, with safeguards for illiterate prisoners.
The Patna High Court has dismissed a plea by members of Bihar’s Watershed Development Teams claiming a 10% annual increment, holding that the 2020 governing-body resolution granting the increment applied only to employees of the Bihar Watershed Development Society, not to WDT members, who are a separate category under the 2008 Watershed Guidelines. The Court held the withdrawal of the wrongly-extended benefit lawful, but directed that amounts already paid need not be refunded.
The Patna High Court has expunged the personal aspersions made by a District Magistrate, sitting as an appellate authority under the Bihar Public Grievance Redressal Act, against a complainant, a Sanskrit scholar and former Vice-Chancellor. While declining to disturb the order on the drainage grievance itself, the Court held that a quasi-judicial authority must decide on facts and law and cannot attack a litigant’s personal character, invoking A.M. Mathur and the ‘good name’ passage from Shakespeare’s Othello.
The Patna High Court has quashed, against the petitioner, a robbery FIR registered at Dhanarua police station, holding it to be an impermissible second FIR over the same transaction, the taking of a Tata Indica and mobile phones, that had already been the subject of an earlier case at Deepnagar. Applying the T.T. Antony ‘test of sameness’, Justice Chandra Shekhar Jha held that continuing the later case would be an abuse of the process of the court.
Upholding a life sentence for the rape of a child, the Patna High Court held that peripheral contradictions in a child victim’s testimony, explained by trauma and the natural limitations of a child witness, do not destroy the substratum of the prosecution case, while sharply criticising the perfunctory police investigation and ordering departmental action against […]
Reversing a family court that had dismissed a wife’s divorce petition for want of specific proof of cruelty, the Patna High Court granted her a decree, holding that a husband who kept his wife out of the matrimonial home for 13 years, and never contested her allegations, had by that very conduct inflicted cruelty. The Court held it could not grant divorce on irretrievable breakdown alone, but that the prolonged deprivation of married life amounted to cruelty.
Three armourer constables asked the Patna High Court to cancel the 2015 appointment of 81 colleagues made without roster clearance, and to restore their seniority, relying on a 2025 order in another case. The Court dismissed the petition on delay and laches, holding that having stayed silent for 11 years they were fence-sitters who could not ride a later favourable ruling, and that they had failed to implead any of the affected appointees.
The petitioner sought the Rs 4 lakh COVID ex-gratia payment for his father’s death, which had been rejected because no RT-PCR or antigen test was done. The Patna High Court accepted that the absence of a test report is not by itself conclusive, but held that the relaxation still requires reliable corroborative proof that the death was due to COVID, and dismissed the petition where the hospital record was silent and the death certificate placed the death at home.