The Supreme Court has delivered a sharp reminder to High Courts: supervisory jurisdiction is not a backdoor appeal.
Revisiting the contours of Article 227 of the Constitution, the Court underscored that High Courts cannot step into the shoes of appellate authorities to re-evaluate facts or replace conclusions simply because another view seems preferable. The power, it stressed, is corrective—not substitutive.
In clear terms, the ruling explains that intervention under Article 227 is justified only in exceptional situations—where a lower court has either assumed jurisdiction it never had, blatantly misused its authority, or refused to exercise jurisdiction it was bound to use. Anything beyond that risks turning supervision into appeal, a transformation the Constitution does not permit.
The judgment also cautions against the temptation to reweigh evidence. Even if a decision appears flawed, the High Court cannot interfere unless the error is glaring on the face of the record or the conclusion is so irrational that no reasonable person could have reached it. Routine factual or legal disagreements do not meet this threshold.
The case itself grew out of a long-running land dispute tied to a road project in Bengaluru. A compromise struck in 2007 promised landowners either alternate land or compensation. When alternate land did not materialize, the executing court stepped in and fixed compensation at ₹1,000 per square foot.
The High Court later halved this amount to ₹500 per square foot, invoking Article 227. That move, however, did not sit well with the Supreme Court.
Setting aside the High Court’s intervention, the top court restored the original valuation, holding that the High Court had crossed the line from supervision into adjudication. By recalculating compensation, it had effectively acted like an appellate court—something Article 227 does not authorize.
The ruling reinforces a narrow but crucial principle: supervisory jurisdiction exists to keep tribunals within bounds, not to second-guess their conclusions. Where a lower court’s decision is reasonable and within jurisdiction, the High Court must resist the urge to rewrite it.
With this, the Supreme Court has once again drawn a firm boundary—Article 227 is a watchdog, not a revisiting chamber.
