1956 (4) TMI 45

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....e paper and the charges for printing are shown separately. In respect of the assessment year 1948-49 and the first nine months of the year 1949-50 the assessees were assessed to sales tax on the proceeds of sale of such job work. They challenged the validity of such assessments and the question which has been referred by the Revising Authority to this Court is- "Whether the turnover of receipt books, registers, forms, letter heads, visiting cards and handbills printed to order when all materials -paper, ink, etc.-are supplied by the presses is assessable to sales tax?" Section 3 of the U.P. Sales Tax Act, 1948, provides (subject to the provisions of the Act) for the payment by a dealer of sales tax on his turnover, and section 4 provides th....

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....re the goods which the assessees sell to their customers, the question is whether each of these items is paper within the meaning of either Notification. The fact that each of these items consists of paper is not, we think, conclusive, for the question which, in our opinion, has to be answered is, what is being sold? The purchase by a practising lawyer of the latest edition of Mulla's Transfer of Property Act would not be described by anyone as a purchase of paper but of a book; but the sale of an obsolete edition of the same work might be merely the sale of waste paper. Suppose the sale of copper to be outside the provisions of the Act. If a pot made of copper is sold as an utensil it would not, in our opinion, be a sale of copper but the ....

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....ay different if the printer holds stocks of paper and the purchase is made from him. The contract of sale becomes complete when the property in the paper is transferred from the seller to the buyer, and in the case of ascertained goods the property therein is transferred to the buyer when the parties intend it to be transferred. How that intention is to be ascertained is laid down in sections 19 and 24 of the Indian Sale of Goods Act. The problem of determining when the property in the paper passed to the customer may not be an easy matter, but we think a useful test question is, on whom will the loss fall if the paper is destroyed by fire while in the hands of the printer? In the present case the assessees submitted to their customers bill....