TaxTMI 
TaxTMI 
1965 (3) TMI 16
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....ct, 1956 amended the Central Excises and Salt Act, 1944 and added the following item as item 12 in the First Schedule of the latter act: 'Vegetable Non-essential Oils all sorts, in or in relation to the manufacture of which any process is ordinarily carried on with the aid of power.' 3. A rate of duty was prescribed for the newly added item. This item was re-numbered as item 12 by the Finance Act, 1950. When the Finance Act, 1956 was still in its Bill form before the Legislature, the respondent Superintendent of Central Excise addressed the following letter to the petitioners on February 29, 1956. "The bearer Mr. R. Mookerjee is an Inspector/Deputy Superintendent of Central Excise. In order to enable the effective implementation of certain clauses of the Finance Bill, 1956, which have been brought into force from the 1st March, 1956, by virtue of a declaration appended to the Bill under the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act, 1931, this office has been empowered. (1) to obtain from you, within 24 hours of the service of this letter, a declaration in the form appended, of all your stocks of Mustard Oil as at the beginning of the day on the 1st March, 1956. (2) to ....
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.... such. 6. Aggrieved by the attitude taken up by the authorities the petitioners, moved that court, under Article 226 of the Constitution, for a mandate upon the respondents directing them not to levy duty on the mustard oil and not to prevent the petitioners from removing mustard oil produced by the petitioners without previous payment of duty and obtanined this Rule, on August 7, 1962. 7. For reasons with which I am not concerned in this rule, the respondents exempted mustard oil from the operation of item 12 of the First schedule to the Central Excises and Salt Act with effect from March 1, 1963. The position now is that the petitioners have got all that they aspired to have by winning a victory in this Rule, even without the intervention of this court. 8.Even then Mr. Jitendra Kumar Sen Gupta learned Advocate for the petitioner, invited a judgment from this court on the points raised by him, on the ground that the petitioners had to deposit considerable amount of money in terms of an injunction granted by this court and the refund of that amount would depend upon the judgment to be delivered by this court, I have, therefore, decided to consider the arg....
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....trial Research, India 1948) : "The genus Brassica consists of over 150 species of annual or biennial herb several of which are cultivated as oil seed crops (rape and mustard) or as vegetable crops (cabbage, cauliflower). The seeds of some yield the condiment, mustard. A few brassicas furnish fodder and green manure. * * * * * The oil-yielding brassicas which are predominantly cross-pollinated, constitute a group about which considerable confusion exists regarding their identification and nomenclature. ** ** ** Zafar Alam (Indina Jounal of Agricultural Science, 1945 15, 173) has discussed the problem of the nomenclature of Indian oleiferous brassicas grown in the Punjab and Prain xx of those grown in eastern India. In India the principal oil-seed crops are yellow sarson, brown sarson toria and rai. Punjab rai, is grown to a limited extent in the central districts of the Pun....
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.... Oil' offered on the market today consists of the synthetic product. The natural oil has lost much of its former importance. Official standard works in the United States recognise both the natural and the synthetic oils as 'Volatile oil of Mustard' or 'Allyl Isothiocyanate'. It is not disputed that the petitioners extract only fixed oil from mustard seeds. That being so, the question is whether fixed oil can be properly classified under the generic chemical description' 'Vegetable non-essential oil'. 14. Mr. Sen Gupta did not dispute the well-known chemical meaning attached to the expression 'essential oil'. He, however contended that the expression 'vegetable non-essential oil' would not apply to fixed oil or fatly oils derived from mustard seeds. I am unable to uphold this contention. All vegetable oils, which are not essential oils, may be rightly classified as non-essential oils and since mustard oils produced by the petitioners does not belong to the classification of essential oil, it is not improper to describe such oil as non-essential oil. From the point of view of user, mustard oil may be treated as an essential cooking medium but because that is so, it does not become....
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....he meaning of the expressions 'essential and non-essential oils'. I, therefore, hold that the last argument advanced by Mr. Sen Gupta also fails. 18. Before I close this Judgment, I need add a word of explanation as to why this court knowing very little about chemical technology quoted extensively from books of Chemistry in trying to find out the meaning of the words 'essential' and non-essential oils. I can do that no better than by quoting the following passage from the judgment of Lord Denning in Baldwin & Francis Ltd. v. Patents Appeal Tribunal (1959) A.C. 663 at p. 691. "My lords whenever the meaning of words arises, however technical or obscure, then unless there is some dispute about it, it is common practice for the court to inform itself by any means that is reliable and ready to hand. Counsel usually give any necessary explanation or reference may be made to a dictionary, which may be a general disctionary or even a technical one. If the subject-matter is too difficult to be resolved by such means, the court can always call in aid an assessor specially qualified to explain it, see section 98 of the Judicature Act, 1925, and this has been done from time to time see, ....