A Public Marginalia

 The Maharashtra Public Service Commission (MPSC) conducts competitive examination for the posts of Civil Judge (Junior Division) and Judicial Magistrate First Class every year (usually). The examination is open to any law graduate (explained here) and is a great opportunity for fresh law graduates to try their luck in securing the coveted post of a trial court judge. The examination is conducted in three stages- Preliminary, Mains and Personality Test. As per the current structure the Preliminary examination is a mere screening test. The Mains and Personality test on the other hand count towards final selection. Eligibility The Eligibility Criteria for this examination has been published on the MPSC website . To summarise, three classes of candidates are eligible viz. fresh law graduates, Advocates, and Ministerial Staff. Fresh law graduates need to graduate with atleast 55% marks in their first attempt. On the other hand, Advocates require practice of not less t...

Land use planning is understood as a systematic and iterative procedure carried out in order to create an enabling environment for sustainable development of land resources which meets people’s needs and demands. Land, including the benefits arising from it are finite. Any country, under usual circumstances, has finite land resource. India being the seventh largest country in the world, land resource management is becoming very important. India has over 17% of world’s population living on 2.4% of the world’s geographical area. Given the economic situation and its demographic resource, development is inevitable, and such expansion demands land as the primary resource. In a high density country like India the use of land must be juudicious to achieve equity. According to the Entry No. 18 of the Seventh Schedule (the State List) of the Constitution of India, land including assessment and collection of revenue, maintenance of land records, land management and alienation of re...

Gunthewari is the de facto mechanism of carving housing plots out of non agricultural land by circumventing the regulatory agencies. In land transaction the acre is often used to express areas of land. Land records are written in metric system. An acre is approximately 40% of a hectare. A Guntha on the other hand is smaller unit of measurement amounting to approximately one-fortieth of an acre.  Thus One Guntha is equal to  1 gunta = 120.999 sq. yards = 101.1714 Sq.mt 1 guntha (R) = 33 ft (10 m) × 33 ft (10 m) = 1,089 sq. ft. (101.2 sq.mt.) Gunthewari as the name suggests is the sale of land, on per guntha basis. Before we dive into the details we need some prerequisite information. The Maharashtra Prevention of Fragmentation and Consolidation of holdings Act 1947 (as modified upto the 18th July 2018) explicitly prohibits fragmentation under section 8 of the Act. It reads as follows No land in any local area shall be transferred or partitioned so as to create a fragment (Secti...