Commissioner Of Income Tax, District Jaipur v. Shri Jain Shwetamber Nakoda Parshwanth Tirth, Balotra, Districtbarmer

HIGH COURT OF JUDICATURE FOR RAJASTHAN ATJODHPUR D.B. Income Tax Appeal No. 2/2022 Commissioner Of Income Tax, District Jaipur ----Appellant Versus Shri Jain Shwetamber Nakoda Parshwanth Tirth, Balotra, DistrictBarmer ----Respondent For Appellant(s) : Mr. Kamal Kishore Bissa, AGCthrough V.C.For Respondent(s): --- HON'BLE THE CHIEF JUSTICE MR. AKIL KURESHI HON'BLE MR. JUSTICE MADAN GOPAL VYAS 01/02/2022 Order This appeal is filed by the Revenue to challenge thejudgment of the Income-tax Appellate Tribunal. Following questionis presented for consideration:- ”Whether on the facts and the circumstances of thecase & law, the ld. ITAT is justified in treating Rs.18.73 crores as Corpus donations even though nospecific directions were made by the donors that itshall form part of the corpus fund of the trust asrequires U/s 11(1)(d) of the Act, 1961?” The respondent assessee is a trust and is engaged in theactivity of facilitating Pooja, Seva etc at a famous pilgrimage placesituated in Rajasthan. For the assessment year 2016-2017, theassessing officer disallowed the claim of the trust for exemption ofa sum of Rs. 18.72 Crore (rounded off) on the ground that thedonations were not received to its corpus. Thus, treating these donations as not corpus donations, the claim of the trust forexemption under Section 11(1)(d), was denied. The assesseecarried the matter in appeal. C.I.T (Appeals) examined the issuesat length and came to the conclusion that the donations werereceived with specifications such as given towards ‘Jeev Daya’,’Shree Gyan Khata’, ‘Education Medical Corpus’, ‘Bhojanshala,Ayambal donations’, ‘Sadhu-Sadhvi Vaiyavach’ and so on. TheCommissioner was of the opinion that for claiming exemptionunder Section 11(1)(d) of the Act, it is not necessary thatvoluntarily contributions should be made to the specific directionto be used in a particular manner in order to treat the donationsas corpus donations. If the intention of the donor is to give moneyto a trust which the trust will keep in the trust account and theincome from the same is to be utilized for carrying out a particularactivity of the trust, it was to be counted for corpus donations.The view of the Commissioner Appeals was confirmed by theTribunal by making following observations:- “4. After considering the rival submissions and theorder of the AO as well as the order of CIT (A), wefind no infirmity in the order passed by CIT(A). Theassessee had been maintaining separate receipts forthe corpus donations. The temple is very popular inthe western Rajasthan and the donations arereceived for general purposes and for specificpurposes also. For Corpus Donations, the assessee ismaintaining separate receipts books, in whichaccording to the direction of the donor, specificdonation given towards corpus donations given ismarket, and the same also contains signatures of thedonor. In these circumstances it cannot be said thatthere is no specific direction of the donor towards theCorpus donations. In view of the provisions ofSection 11(1)(d) of the Act, these corpus donationstherefore cannot be treated as revenue receipts, andin our considered opinion the order of the CIT(A) onthis issue is justified and therefore we are inclined toaccept the ground raised by the revenue and thesame is hereby dismissed. It can thus be seen that the Commissioner (Appeals) and theTribunal after detailed examinations had come to the conclusionthat the assessee was maintaining separate receipts for corpusdonations and for the donations received for general purposes.The receipts maintained for corpus donations show the directionsissued by the donor for the use of the fund for specific purposes.Such receipts also contain signatures of the donors. It wastherefore concluded that such donations cannot be seen as havingused specific directions of the donor towards corpus funds andaccordingly such corpus donations cannot be treated as revenuereceipts. In view of such facts, we find no error in the views of CIT(Appeals) and Tribunal. No question of law arises. The appeal is dismissed. (MADAN GOPAL VYAS),J14-jayesh/- (AKIL KURESHI),CJ