A commentary on Shri Ranbir Singh v. DCIT, Central-2, Chandigarh (ITA No. 1413/CHD/2026, order dated 14 August 2026)
We are, by now, used to the sight of a courtroom turning gardener. Over the last two years, plantation “riders” have quietly become part of the grammar of criminal bail — an accused walks free on the promise of a hundred saplings, and a High Court adds its small weight to the war on a warming planet. What we are not used to is a tax tribunal doing the same thing. And that is precisely what makes the recent order of the Chandigarh Bench of the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal in Ranbir Singh worth pausing over. So far as I have been able to find, no Income Tax, Customs or GST tribunal in the country had, until this order, made relief conditional on the planting of trees. This may well be the first time a taxman’s forum has asked a litigant to pay his dues, in part, to the soil.
The matter, shorn of drama
The facts carry the unmistakable scent of the demonetisation years. Shri Ranbir Singh of Yamuna Nagar had filed his return for AY 2017-18 declaring a little under ₹1.79 lakh of income and ₹3 lakh of agricultural income. On scrutiny, the Assessing Officer found rather more than the return admitted — cash deposits of nearly ₹85.93 lakh during the note-ban window, unsecured loans of some ₹9.25 crore, sundry creditors of over ₹1.07 crore, and agricultural income he could not substantiate. None of it was satisfactorily explained. The additions swelled to about ₹11.22 crore, and his assessed income was fixed at ₹11.23 crore under section 143(3). The Commissioner (Appeals) confirmed the lot. By the time the appeal reached the Tribunal, the figures were forbidding and two authorities had already said no.
What the Bench actually did
Confronted with all this, the Bench of Shri Laliet Kumar and Shri Vijay Varma did the sober, unglamorous thing. It did not delete a single rupee. It did not opine on the genuineness of one loan. It recognised that the mountain of additions had grown, in good part, because the assessee had never actually placed his documents on record — and, in the interest of justice, gave him one final opportunity, remanding the matter to the Assessing Officer so the case could at last be examined on its merits.
So far, an ordinary order of remand. What makes it extraordinary is the toll gate. That fresh opportunity was made conditional: within one month, the assessee must plant 500 trees on the bank of the Yamuna at the Samalakha site in Panipat, through a named NGO, and maintain them at ₹30 per plant per year — or deposit the equivalent cost with the NGO and furnish proof before the AO. Miss it, and the order below stands restored and the appeal stands dismissed.
The gentle absurdities (in which the AO becomes a forester)
And yet — because an honest admirer is still allowed to smile — one cannot read the condition without a few impish questions bubbling up.
Consider the poor Assessing Officer. This is a man trained to interrogate the identity, creditworthiness and genuineness of a taxpayer’s creditors — the holy trinity of the unexplained cash credit. He is now to apply that very same trinity to trees. Identity: are these the promised indigenous species, or a row of opportunistic weeds in disguise? Creditworthiness: will sapling number 287 actually survive the summer, or is it, too, a paper entry with no substance behind it? Genuineness: has the plantation genuinely happened, or is the “proof” a cleverly angled photograph of the same shrub taken five hundred times? The officer who could not satisfy himself about the genuineness of a ₹9-crore loan must now satisfy himself about the genuineness of a forest.
And what of the arithmetic, of which our profession is so fond? The order says 500. Suppose the assessee, in a burst of sincerity, plants 500 — and a stray cow on the Yamuna bank makes a leisurely meal of sapling number 473. Does the relief survive at 499? Is there a de minimis for foliage? Must he file a miscellaneous application pleading that the shortfall was an act of God, or at least an act of goat? One can almost see the future cause-title: In re: Deforestation by Cattle, Unexplained. The condition, in fixing a hard legal consequence to an outcome that partly depends on monsoons, termites and municipal grazing, has smuggled a small ecological lottery into an otherwise precise order. It is charming. It is also, if one is being exacting, a little imprecise — the sort of thing appellate hindsight tends to tidy up.
Why, on balance, this is welcome and not worrying
Here is where I part company with the reflex to criticise.
The higher judiciary has, in recent months, frowned on plantation conditions — but read those cautions closely and they belong to a different room of the house. They arose in criminal matters, where a High Court had suspended a convict’s sentence on the strength of a few saplings, and the objection was pointed: a noble social cause cannot substitute for the statutory tests that govern a person’s liberty. The reasoning is bolted to criminal jurisprudence, where the stakes are freedom and the gravity of the offence looms over everything.
Tax is simply not that room. The stakes here are money, not liberty. There is no heinous act to be trivialised, no victim to be affronted by a lenient bench. The Tribunal’s power under section 254 — to pass “such orders thereon as it thinks fit” — is among the widest in our statute book. And, most importantly, the tree condition displaces no statutory test whatsoever. The remand stands on its own natural-justice footing; the fresh verification would follow regardless; not a rupee of liability is bartered away. The trees are a complement to justice, not a coin paid in its place. That single distinction, to my mind, is what carries this order safely past the criticism that has dogged its criminal cousins.
Seen that way, the tax bench may in fact be the safest laboratory in which to try this experiment. A demonetisation-era assessee with unexplained crores is nobody’s idea of a wronged innocent; a river that needs trees is nobody’s idea of a bad cause; and a remand that decides nothing on merits is nobody’s idea of an injustice. The equities are low-risk, the public benefit is real, and the constitutional value being served — the duty under Article 51A(g) to protect and improve the environment — costs the exchequer precisely nothing.
A seed worth watching
I read Ranbir Singh as a welcome order — welcome because it is fair, welcome because it is imaginative, and welcome because it gently refuses the idea that a tax file and a social conscience must be strangers. It hands an aggrieved assessee the one thing our system prizes above all, a genuine opportunity to be heard, and asks him only to leave the world a little greener for having received it.
If five hundred trees now take root on the bank of the Yamuna because of an income-tax appeal, then a matter that would otherwise have died in a dusty file will have grown into something that outlives it. The higher courts may, in time, refine the mechanics — trim the arithmetic, worry about which NGO and why, insist that green good intentions stay tethered to the four corners of the Act. They should. But the instinct behind this order deserves not a frown but a nod, and perhaps a sapling planted in its honour.
Preferably one the cattle can’t reach.
The views expressed here are personal.
