Madras High Court: feeding the hungry isn't 'religious' enough to exempt land from ceiling law

A 135-year-old trust deed executed in 1891 created two charities: a "Chathiram" endowed for feeding the poor, students and travellers, and a "Kattalai" endowed for temple worship. Decades of land-ceiling proceedings under the Tamil Nadu Land Reforms (Fixation of Ceiling on Land) Act, 1961 treated the Kattalai as a religious trust exempt under Section 2 of the Act, but found the Chathiram purely charitable, declaring over 100 of its 219 acres surplus; the land was later assigned to landless beneficiaries. Decades later, the trust argued the two charities had merged under a 1923 civil-court Scheme Decree into a single religious holding, and sought the exemption for all its land.

The Madras High Court held that Section 2(3)(b) of the Act deems a trust religious only if its income is actually appropriated for a purpose of a religious nature; feeding the hungry, without more, is charitable and becomes religious only if integrally connected to a religious festival or observance, as the Supreme Court held in Commissioner, Madras HR&CE v. Narayana Ayyangar (1965) interpreting similarly worded legislation. Since the Scheme Decree itself required the two charities' accounts to be kept separate, no merger occurred. Because an exemption clause departs from a welfare statute meant to benefit the landless, the Court held, following Commissioner of Customs v. Dilip Kumar (2018), that it must be construed strictly, with the burden on the claimant, and dismissed the writ petition.