1957 (1) TMI 30

X X   X X   Extracts   X X   X X

Full Text of the Document

X X   X X   Extracts   X X   X X

....wering these questions a few facts have to be narrated. The assessee is one G.R. Kulkarni. He is a railway contractor, who takes on contracts the digging and preparing of gitti (metal) and collecting it at the railway sidings according to his contracts and who sells this metal for construction of roads and as ballast etc. The short question, therefore, is whether the breaking of boulders into metal (gitti) is a process of manufacture. 3.. We may mention that the case arose before the passing of Act 20 of 1953, which introduced a section defining "manufacture". That definition says that manufacture includes any process or manner of producing, preparing or making any goods. In our opinion, even without this definition the word "manufacture....

X X   X X   Extracts   X X   X X

Full Text of the Document

X X   X X   Extracts   X X   X X

....f quarrying results in the accumulation or extraction of a large heap of big stones. Those stones may well be marketable, and if they are sold the process would be not one of manufacture but one of quarrying. After that stage is reached and the person who has won the stones attempts to break them, may be by manual labour, into sizeable stones for sale as gitti, he is shaping the stone into an object of a different size. Now, the word "manufacture" has got various shades of meaning. There may be manufacture of a complicated object like the super-constellation, or there might be manufacture of a simple object like a toy kite. In the Calcutta case which is reported in 1 S.T.C. 157 (North Bengal Stores Ltd. v. Board of Revenue, Bengal) a mixtur....

X X   X X   Extracts   X X   X X

Full Text of the Document

X X   X X   Extracts   X X   X X

....stone into smaller ones of a pre-determined size. It is well-known that metal has to be within a particular size. Each piece cannot be smaller than a designated size nor above another designated size. The size therefore Cockburn, C.J., dealing with the case of preparing slates after quarrying said that it was a manufacturing process. There also the slate blocks which were won were merely split into sheets with the use of a hammer and chisel or wedges. The entire process was manual. We do not see any distinction between the fashioning of slate from a block and the fashioning of a graded size metal from a big block or boulder of stone. The essential condition is the same, viz., that there is an expenditure of some skill in fashioning an objec....