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CIVIL APPELLATE JURISDICTION: Civil Appeal Nos. 450O and 4501 of 1984.

Appeals by Special leave from the Judgment and order dated the 18th January and 18 January, 1984 of the Punjab and Haryana High Court in Civil Writ Nos. 33OO of 1981 aud 4757 of 1982.

H.K. Puri, M.P. Jha and Sanjeev Walia for the Appellants.

S.K Bagga for the Respondent.

L.N. Sinha, A.K Panda and Ashwani Kumar for the Respon. dent The Judgment of the Court was delivered by CINNABAR REDDY J. The appellants, who are traders engaged in the purchase and sale of agricultural produce, appear to be a determined lot. For over a decade, they or those similarly placed have been litigating and impeding the levy and collection of Market fee by the Market Committees constituted under the Punjab Agricultural Produce Markets Act. Sometimes they have been successful, sometimes they have not. One of the occasions when they appeared to be successful was when this Court in Kewal Krishan Puri v. State Of Punjab(l) declared that the enhancement of the fee from 2% to 3 % was illegal. The court while striking down the enhancement of the fee laid down no new principles but made certain general observations which, we regret to say, have been so misunderstood and misinterpreted as to lead to some confusion and public mischief. The misunderstanding and confusion have also naturally led to more litigation. Fortunately, in Srinivsa General Trader. v. Slate of Andhra Pradesh(2) this Court has removed much of the misunderstanding, cleared many of the cobwebs and retrieved the situation.

That was why Sen J. in Sreenivasa General Traders v. State of Andhra Pradesh (Supra) took immense pains to explain the observations of Untwalia J. and place them in their proper setting. He observed, very rightly indeed, G "In the ultimate analysis, the Court held in Kewal Krishan Puri's case, supra that so long as the concept of fee remains distinct and limited in contrast to tax, such expenditure of the amounts recovered by the levy of a market fee cannot be countenanced in law. A case is an authority H only for what it actually decides and not for what may logically follow from it. Every judgment must be read as applicable to the particular facts proved, or assumed to be proved, since the generality of the expressions which may be founded there are not intended to be expositions of the whole law but governed or qualified by the particular facts of the case in which such expressions are to be found. It would appear that there are certain observations to be found in the judgment in Kewat Krishan Puri's case, supra. which were really not necessary for purposes of the decision and go beyond the occasion and therefore they have no binding authority though they may have merely persuasive value. The observation made therein seeking to quantify the extent of correlation between the amount of fee collected and the cost of rendition of service, namely:

In Sreenivasa General Traders v. State of Andhra Pradesh (supra), Sen, J. had also pointed out that there was no generic difference between a tax and a fee, that both were compulsory exactions of money by public authorities and that a levy in the nature of a fee did not cease to be of that character merely because there was an element of compulsion or coerciveness present in it nor was it a postulate of a fee that it must have direct relation to the actual service rendered by the authority to each individual, who obtains the benefit of the service. He also drew attention to the increasing realization that the element of quid pro quo in the strict sense was not always sine quo non for fee. Nor was the element of quid pro quo necessarily absent in every tax. He further pointed out that an insistence upon a good and substantial portion of an amount collected on account of fee, say in the neighbourhood of two-thirds or three-forths, being shown with reasonable certainty as having been spent for rendering services in the market to the payer of fee, could not be a rule of universal application, and that it was a rule which had necessarily to be confined to the special facts of Kewal Krishan Puri's case. Otherwise, it would affect the validity of marketing legislations undertaken throughout the country during the past half a century. We agree with the view of Sen, J. that the observations extracted by him from Kewol Krishan Puri's case were not really necessary for that case and we also agree with the clarification of the observation made by Sen, J. There is one other significant sentence in Sreenivasa General Traders v. State of A.P. (Supra) with which we must express our agreement. It was said, . with utmost respect, these observations of the learned judge are not to be read as Euclid's A theorems, nor as provisions of the statute. These observations must be read in the context in which they appear." We consider it proper to say, as we have already said in other cases, that judgments of courts are not to be construed as statutes. To interpret words, phrases and provisions of a statute, it may become necessary for judges to embark into lengthy discussions but the discussion is meant to explain and not to define. Judges interpret statutes, they do not interpret judgments. They interpret words of statutes; their words are not to be interpreted as statutes. In London Graving Dock Co. Ltd. v. Horton (1) Lord Mac Doormat observed, "The matter cannot, of course, resettled merely by treating the ip sesame verba of Willes, J., as though they were part of an Act of Parliament and applying the rules of interpretation appropriate thereto. This is not to detract from the great weight to be given to the language actually used by that most distinguished judge." D In Home office v. Dorset Yacht Co.(2) Lord Reid said, "Lord Atkin's speech.. is not to be treated as if it was a statutory definition. It will require qualification in new circumstances." Megarry, J. in 1971(1) W.L.R. 1062 observed, "one must not, of course, construe even a reserved judgment of even Russell L. J. as if it were an Act of Parliament. And, in Herington v. British Railways Board."(2) Lord Morris said:

"There is always peril in treating the words of a speech or judgment as though they are words in a legislative P enactment, and it is to be remembered that judicial utterances are made in the setting of the facts of a particular case.
There are a few other observations in Rewal Krishan Puri's case to which apply with the same force all that we have said above. It is needless to repeat the of quoted truism of Lord Halsbury that (1) [1951] A.C. 737 at 761 (2) [1970] 2 All. E.R. 294 (3) [19721 2 W.L.R. 537 H a case is only an authority for what it actually decides and not for what may seem to follow logically from it. We have said so much about Kewal Krishan Puri's case because the learned counsel placed implicit reliance upon it though as we shall presently show, we do not see how a mere declaration that the levy and collection of fee in excess of Rs.2 per hundred automatically vest in the dealer the right to get at the excess amount when in fact he did not bear the burden of it and when the moral and equitable owner of it was the consumer-public to whom the burden had been passed on.