Madras High Court sets aside order to take over 7.44 acres of prime land in Chennai from Sri Ramachandra Educational and Health Trust

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The Division Bench also set aside other directions issued by the single judge who had quashed a Government Order issued on June 12, 1998 permitting Tamil Nadu Housing Board to sell the land to the trust and the fixation of sale price at ₹6.01 lakh per ground in 2007. | Photo Credit: PICHUMANI K

The first Division Bench of the Madras High Court on Thursday (October 15, 2026) set aside an order passed by a single judge on November 12, 2025 directing the Tamil Nadu government to take back 7.44 acres of land at Thiruvanmiyur in Chennai from Sri Ramachandra Educational and Health Trust.

The Bench comprising Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari and Justice G. Arul Murugan held that a single judge could not issue such a direction in a writ petition filed by a personally aggrieved party and that it could have been issued only by a Division Bench in a public interest litigation petition.

Allowing a writ appeal filed by the trust, the Division Bench also set aside other directions issued by the single judge who had quashed a Government Order issued on June 12, 1998 permitting Tamil Nadu Housing Board (TNHB) to sell the land to the trust and the fixation of sale price at ₹6.01 lakh per ground in 2007.

In his 2025 order, Justice M. Dhandapani had also set aside the sale deeds executed by TNHB in favour of the trust on July 14, 2014 and directed the Housing Board to repay the sale consideration of ₹33.46 crore to the trust along with simple interest at the rate of 6% per annum so that the land could be put to better public purpose.

Setting aside all those directions, the Bench held they could not have been issued in a 2022 writ petition filed by R. Parameswari of Chennai who had staked claimed over just 10,254 square feet of the land by contending her family members had alienated the property when she was just 15 years old in 1981.

After holding that the single judge had rightly rejected the writ petitioner’s plea for reconveyance of her share out of the much larger extent of 96.92 acres acquired by the State government in the 1980s for the Besant Nagar Phase II scheme, the Chief Justice’s Bench said, he should not have passed further directions.

The Bench also disapproved of the single judge’s observations that the 7.44 acres of land, which the government exempted from the acquistion proceedings at the request of the trust and directed the TNHB to sell it to the trust, might have fetched a much better price for the public exchequer if the property had been auctioned.

“In the case at hand, we are not asked to decide whether the government could have put this land up for auction, or whether a different use would have served the public better. This falls within the realm of policy decision,” the Bench concluded after concurring with the submissions of appellant’s counsel Muthucharan Sundresh.

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