Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Property: Madras High Court Orders HR&CE Temple Land Survey, Bars Alienation

CHENNAI — The Madras High Court has directed the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department to complete a survey of every parcel of land held by temples and religious institutions in Tamil Nadu within six months, and has barred the sale, exchange, mortgage or long lease of any temple property until the survey report is placed before it. A Division Bench passed the order on 15 October in a writ petition the court had registered on its own motion after a series of complaints that temple lands were disappearing from revenue records.

"Temple property is held in trust. It cannot quietly disappear from the records," the bench said.

What the court ordered

• A survey, by survey number, of all immovable property entered in the registers that every institution is required to maintain under Section 29 of the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Act, 1959, and of any property omitted from those registers.
• Reconciliation of each entry with the revenue records held by the district administration, with discrepancies — patta issued to private persons, missing survey numbers, sub-divisions not reflected — listed separately.
• Identification of encroachments, of leases that have expired or were never sanctioned, and of transfers made without the Commissioner's sanction under Section 34.
• Publication of the consolidated register on the department's website, temple by temple.
• A freeze, pending the report, on any sanction under Section 34 for sale, exchange, mortgage or lease beyond one year, with existing short-term leases and rent collection to continue.
• A direction to district collectors not to issue or renew patta for land that appears in a temple's register without the department's written confirmation, and status reports from the Commissioner every eight weeks.

The scale of the problem

The department administers more than 44,000 temples and institutions, which together hold about 4.78 lakh acres of land — down from roughly 5.25 lakh acres recorded some decades ago, as the court noted in 2018 when it first directed the authorities to retrieve alienated and encroached property. Since 2021 the department has reported recovering several thousand acres from encroachers, has mapped a large part of its holdings digitally and has begun planting boundary stones on surveyed land. The bench recorded those efforts but observed that they had proceeded without a single authoritative register that a citizen, a collector or a court could consult, and that the gap was being exploited.

The law on temple property

• Alienation needs sanction. Section 34 of the 1959 Act provides that no exchange, sale or mortgage, and no lease for more than five years, of immovable property belonging to a religious institution is valid without the prior sanction of the Commissioner, which may be given only if the transaction is necessary or beneficial to the institution, after public notice. A transfer without sanction is void.
• Purchasers without sanction are encroachers. In its 2018 directions, the court held that persons claiming under unsanctioned transfers have no better title than encroachers, and that the Assistant Commissioner may proceed against them under Sections 78 and 79, which provide a summary procedure for eviction and recovery of rent and damages after notice and enquiry.
• Registers. Section 29 requires every institution to maintain a register of its properties, approved by the department, and to update it. The bench observed that in many institutions the register had not been updated for decades.
• Property vests in the deity. The deity is a juristic person, and trustees and the department hold its property as fiduciaries. The court reiterated that neither the trustee nor the state can deal with temple land as if it were its own.

Temple property is held in trust. It cannot quietly disappear from the records.

From the order

Why the court acted on its own motion

The petition was registered after three unconnected matters came before different benches in the same month: a temple in Kancheepuram district whose land had been sub-divided and assigned patta to forty-one private persons; a mutt whose lease to a trust had been renewed for ninety-nine years without sanction; and a Chennai temple whose register showed property that no longer appeared in any revenue record. The bench said the pattern — not the individual cases — called for a statewide answer.

What it means

• For occupants of temple land: valid leases continue on their terms. Occupation without a lease, or under an expired or unsanctioned one, is exposed to proceedings under Sections 78 and 79 once the survey identifies it.
• For buyers of land in Tamil Nadu: a temple or the department anywhere in the chain of title is a reason to stop. Check the encumbrance certificate and patta for the survey number against the department's registers before paying an advance.
• For temples and trustees: the survey is an opportunity to restore property to the register and to recover rent. Trustees who have allowed property to be dealt with without sanction may face proceedings.
• For the department: six months, eight-weekly status reports and a public register — the first time the court has set the department a deadline rather than a direction.

The Counsel will report the Commissioner's status reports as they are filed. Anyone holding, leasing or buying land that may belong to a religious institution should consult a qualified property lawyer before acting.

This report is for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Readers should consult a qualified lawyer about their own circumstances. Case citations are to The Counsel Reports (TCR) unless otherwise stated.