Rajasthan High Court - Jodhpur
Commissioner Of Income Tax vs Shri Jain Shwetamber Nakoda Parshwanth ... on 1 February, 2022
Bench: Akil Kureshi, Madan Gopal Vyas
HIGH COURT OF JUDICATURE FOR RAJASTHAN AT
JODHPUR
D.B. Income Tax Appeal No. 2/2022
Commissioner Of Income Tax, District Jaipur
----Appellant
Versus
Shri Jain Shwetamber Nakoda Parshwanth Tirth, Balotra, District
Barmer
----Respondent
For Appellant(s) : Mr. Kamal Kishore Bissa, AGC
through V.C.
For Respondent(s) : ---
HON'BLE THE CHIEF JUSTICE MR. AKIL KURESHI
HON'BLE MR. JUSTICE MADAN GOPAL VYAS
Order 01/02/2022 This appeal is filed by the Revenue to challenge the judgment of the Income-tax Appellate Tribunal. Following question is presented for consideration:-
"Whether on the facts and the circumstances of the case & law, the ld. ITAT is justified in treating Rs. 18.73 crores as Corpus donations even though no specific directions were made by the donors that it shall form part of the corpus fund of the trust as requires U/s 11(1)(d) of the Act, 1961?"
The respondent assessee is a trust and is engaged in the activity of facilitating Pooja, Seva etc at a famous pilgrimage place situated in Rajasthan. For the assessment year 2016-2017, the assessing officer disallowed the claim of the trust for exemption of a sum of Rs. 18.72 Crore (rounded off) on the ground that the donations were not received to its corpus. Thus, treating these (Downloaded on 02/02/2022 at 08:33:44 PM) (2 of 3) [ITA-2/2022] donations as not corpus donations, the claim of the trust for exemption under Section 11(1)(d), was denied. The assessee carried the matter in appeal. C.I.T (Appeals) examined the issues at length and came to the conclusion that the donations were received with specifications such as given towards 'Jeev Daya', 'Shree Gyan Khata', 'Education Medical Corpus', 'Bhojanshala, Ayambal donations', 'Sadhu-Sadhvi Vaiyavach' and so on. The Commissioner was of the opinion that for claiming exemption under Section 11(1)(d) of the Act, it is not necessary that voluntarily contributions should be made to the specific direction to be used in a particular manner in order to treat the donations as corpus donations. If the intention of the donor is to give money to a trust which the trust will keep in the trust account and the income from the same is to be utilized for carrying out a particular activity of the trust, it was to be counted for corpus donations. The view of the Commissioner Appeals was confirmed by the Tribunal by making following observations:-
"4. After considering the rival submissions and the order of the AO as well as the order of CIT (A), we find no infirmity in the order passed by CIT(A). The assessee had been maintaining separate receipts for the corpus donations. The temple is very popular in the western Rajasthan and the donations are received for general purposes and for specific purposes also. For Corpus Donations, the assessee is maintaining separate receipts books, in which according to the direction of the donor, specific donation given towards corpus donations given is market, and the same also contains signatures of the donor. In these circumstances it cannot be said that there is no specific direction of the donor towards the Corpus donations. In view of the provisions of Section 11(1)(d) of the Act, these corpus donations therefore cannot be treated as revenue receipts, and in our considered opinion the order of the CIT(A) on this issue is justified and therefore we are inclined to accept the ground raised by the revenue and the same is hereby dismissed.(Downloaded on 02/02/2022 at 08:33:44 PM)
(3 of 3) [ITA-2/2022]
5. In the result, the appeal of the Revenue is dismissed."
It can thus be seen that the Commissioner (Appeals) and the Tribunal after detailed examinations had come to the conclusion that the assessee was maintaining separate receipts for corpus donations and for the donations received for general purposes. The receipts maintained for corpus donations show the directions issued by the donor for the use of the fund for specific purposes. Such receipts also contain signatures of the donors. It was therefore concluded that such donations cannot be seen as having used specific directions of the donor towards corpus funds and accordingly such corpus donations cannot be treated as revenue receipts. In view of such facts, we find no error in the views of CIT (Appeals) and Tribunal. No question of law arises.
The appeal is dismissed.
(MADAN GOPAL VYAS),J (AKIL KURESHI),CJ
14-jayesh/-
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