Basic concept of Co- ownership
The principal question, therefore, is whether the plain- tiff being a co-owner landlord can be said to reasonably require the premises for his own occupation within the expression "if he is the owner" in section 13 ( 1 ) (f). Mr. V.S. Desai reads to us from Salmond on Juris- prudence (13th edition) and relies on the following passage in Chapter 8 (Ownership), paragraph 46 at page 254: "As a general rule a thing is owned by one person only at a time, but duplicate ownership is perfectly possible. Two or more persons may at the same time have ownership of the same thing vested in them. This may happen in several distinct ways, but the simplest and most obvious case is that of co-ownership. Partners, for example, are co-owners of the chattels which constitute their stock-in trade of the lease of the premises on which their business is conducted, and of the debts owing to them by their customers. It is not correct to say that property owned by co-owners is divided between them, each of them owning a sepa- rate part. It is an undivided unity, which is vested at the same time in more than one person ...... The several ownership of a part is a different thing from the co-ownership of the whole. So soon as each of two co-owners begins to own a part of the thing instead of the whole of it, the co-ownership has been dissolved into sole
ownership by the process known as partition. Co- ownership involves the undivided integrity of what is owned"
Supreme Court of India
Sriram Pasricha vs Jagannath & Ors on 24 August, 1976
Equivalent citations: 1976 AIR 2335, 1977 SCR (1) 395
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