TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
1998 (1) TMI 72
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.... from the date on which it is printed in the Government Gazette or from the date it is made available to public. 2.To illustrate the circumstances in which this question arises, we will state the facts of Civil Appeal No. 4569 of 1989. the company involved in this appeal is the New Tobacco Company Limited. It was earlier known as Duncan Tobacco Company. It is engaged in manufacturing cigarettes. Since 1979, it used to pay duty on cigarettes manufactured by it at the rate fixed by Central Excise Notification No. 30/79, dated 1st March, 1979, as amended from time to time. It was rescinded with effect from 30th November, 1982 by Notification No. 284/82-C.E., dated 30th November, 1982, which prescribed new rates of excise duty. Between 30th November, 1982 and 8th December, 1982, the Company cleared 79,456 million cigarettes and paid duty thereon at the rate fixed by the Notification dated 1st March, 1979, as it did not know that a new notification was issued on 30th November, 1982. As the Company had paid duty at a lesser rate, a Show Cause Notice dated 22nd December, 1982, was issued calling upon the Company to show cause why it should not pay the differential amount between the duty....
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....and, it was contended by the learned Counsel for the respondents that publication cannot be equated with mere printing and it is the availability of the printed material to the general public that constitutes publication as required by the statute and the rules of natural justice. 4.Section 38 of the Act provides that all the rules made and notifications issued under the Act shall be published in the official Gazette. So, the requirement of Section 38 is publication of the rules and the notifications in the official Gazette. The dictionary meaning of the word `publish' as given in Webster's Comprehensive Dictionary, International Edition, is "(1) To make known or announce publicly; promulgate; proclaim. (2) To print and issue to the public. (3) To communicate to a third person." According to the Legal Glossary, published by the Legislative Department, Ministry of Law, Justice and Company Affairs, Government of India in 1992, it means "to make generally accessible or available; to place before or offer to public; to bring before the public for sale or distribution". Thus the word `publish' connotes not only an act of printing but also further action of issuing or making it availabl....
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....he Defence of India Rules. It then made an important observation that this rule was only an application of a deeper rule which is founded on natural justice. It has further observed that "it would be against the principles of natural justice to permit the subjects of a State to be punished or penalised by laws of which they had no knowledge and of which they could not even with the exercise of reasonable diligence have acquired any knowledge. Natural justice requires that before a law can become operative it must be promulgated or published. It must be broadcast in some recognisable way so that all men may know what it is; or, at the very least, there must be some special rule or regulation or customary channel by or through which such knowledge can be acquired with the exercise of due and reasonable diligence. The thought that a decision reached in the secret recesses of a chamber to which the public have no access and to which even their accredited representatives have no access and of which they can normally know nothing, can nevertheless affect their lives, liberty and property by the mere passing of a Resolution without anything more is abhorrent to civilised man. It shocks hi....
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....e law-making authority can or need do, would be to publish it in such manner that persons can, if they are interested, acquaint themselves with the contents. 7.In State of Madhya Pradesh v. Ram Ragubir Prasad Agarwal [AIR 1979 SC 888], while interpreting the word `publish' in Section 3(2) of M.P. Prathamik, Middle School Tatha Madhyamik Shiksha (Pathya Pustakon Sambandhi Vyavastha) Adhiniyam, this Court observed that "in our view, the purpose of Section 3 animates the meaning of the expression `publish'. `Publication' is the act of publishing anything; offering it to public notice, or rendering it accessible to public scrutiny.... an advising of the public; a making known of something to them for a purpose. Logomachic exercises need not detain us because the obvious legislative object is to ensure that when the Board lays down the `syllabi' it must publish `the same' so that when the stage of prescribing text-books according to such syllabi arrives, both the publishers and the State Government and even the educationists among the public may have some precise conception about the relevant syllabi to enable Government to decide upon suitable text-books from the private market or com....
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....to the respondents to get out of the legal implications flowing from want of due notification, as exemplified above. Printing the notification in the Official Gazette, without making it available for circulation to the concerned public, or placing it for sale to the said public, would certainly not satisfy the idea of notification in the legal sense." 9.The same view was taken by the Bombay High Court in GTC Industries Ltd. v. Union of India [1988 (33) E.L.T. 83 (Bom.) = 1987 (13) ECR 1161] and by Delhi High Court in Universal Cans and Containers v. Union of India [1993 (64) E.L.T. 23 (Delhi)]. 10.The following observations made in the case of B.K. Srinivasan and Others v. State of Karnataka [1987 (1) SCC 658] also support the view that we are taking:- "Whether law is viewed from the stand point of the `conscientious good man' seeking to abide by the law or from the stand point of Justice Holmes's `unconscientious bad man' seeking to avoid the law, law must be known, that is to say, it must be so made it can be known." 11.Our attention was also drawn to the decisions of this Court in Pankaj Jain Agencies v. Union of India and Others [1994 (72) E.L.T. 805 (S.C.) = 1994 (5) SCC 1....