Anr. ,3 in which a challenge to the decision of the Full Bench of this Court4 failed. Mr. Seervai points out that the Supreme Court decision was rendered on 13th August 2013, about five days after Mrs. Dalvi J’s order of 8th August 2013. The Supreme Court has in terms approved the Full Bench’s view that even a gratuitous licensee is covered by the expression ‘licensee’ in Section 41(1) of the Presidency Small Causes Court Act, 1882 (“ the Presidency SCC Act ”), as amended in 1976. The Presidency SCC Act makes no distinction between a licensee for consideration and a licensee for no consideration. Neither does Section 52 of the Easements Act, 1882. The rule of noscitur a sociis has no application to such cases. In paragraph 575 the Supreme Court noted that the High Court’s Full Bench correctly held that the purpose of clubbing the expression ‘licensor and licensee’ with ‘landlord and tenant’ in Section 41(1) of the Presidency SCC Act was to bring both under a single jurisdictional umbrella, and it makes no difference that one of these — ‘landlord and tenant’ — is covered by local rent control legislation and the other, ‘licensor and licensee’, is not. The Supreme Court specifically rejected the proposition that when such exclusive jurisdiction was statutorily conferred, it could plausibly be said that the legislative intent was to keep out of the sweep of this jurisdictional provision one particular species of licensor-licensee relationship, viz., a gratuitous licensee. That, the Supreme Court held, was not the statutory intent.
