Revisional remedy under sales tax law need not follow appeal first, and prepayment condition applies only where expressly provided.

A revision application under the Bombay Sales Tax Act could be filed directly without first exhausting an appeal, because the statutory scheme did not make prior appeal a universal prerequisite. Prepayment of assessed tax and penalty was not a condition precedent for every revision: Section 22 contained no express such requirement, and Rule 48, read with Form XXV, applied prepayment only to revisions arising from appellate orders. The text distinguishes this limited rule from Section 21, where the Legislature imposed an express prepayment condition, showing that the requirement could not be extended by implication. The revision was therefore maintainable in the first instance, and the matter was to be considered on merits.

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Issues: Whether a revision application under the Bombay Sales Tax Act could be filed directly without first preferring an appeal, and whether prepayment of the assessed tax and penalty was a mandatory condition for entertaining such revision.

Analysis: Section 22 conferred revisional power subject to prescribed rules, and Rule 48 applied prepayment only to revisions against orders passed in appeal. The wording of Rule 48(2) and Form XXV did not create an independent obligation to pay tax and penalty where the statute and rules did not impose it. The absence of any express requirement in Section 22, contrasted with the specific condition in Section 21, showed that the Legislature did not intend the prepayment condition to govern all revisions. The statutory scheme also did not deprive an aggrieved dealer of the choice between the available remedies merely because an appeal had not been pursued first.

Conclusion: The revision application was maintainable in the first instance, and prepayment of tax and penalty was not a condition precedent in the circumstances. This issue was decided in favour of the applicant.

Final Conclusion: The objection to maintainability failed, and the matter had to go back for consideration on merits by the competent revisional authority.

Ratio Decidendi: Where the statute makes prepayment a condition only for a specified class of revisions, that condition cannot be extended to other revisions by implication from a form or by reading into the provision a requirement omitted by the Legislature.

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