A person claiming adverse possession of a property must know its actual owner, the Supreme Court has ruled.  For the uninitiated, adverse possession is a situation in which the actual owner of a property loses their ownership rights as a result of their failure to remove a trespasser from the property within a set period.

While delivering its order in the M Radheshyamlal versus V Sandhya and Anr. Etc case, a two-Judge Bench of Justice Abhay S Oka and Justice Ujjal Bhuyan also stated that to prove an adverse possession, a person must establish when they came into possession, and plead and prove that they were claiming possession adverse to the true owner, that their long and continuous possession was known to the true owner and that their possession was open and undisturbed.

The apex court was deliberating on a series of appeals stemming from three distinct lawsuits concerning a property dispute.

“It is a settled law that by pleading adverse possession, a party seeks to defeat the rights of the true owner, and therefore, there is no equity in his favour. After all, the plea is based on continuous wrongful possession for a period of more than 12 years. Therefore, the facts constituting the ingredients of adverse possession must be pleaded and proved by the plaintiff,” the top court said.

While stating that there was no proper foundation for the plea of adverse possession in the plaint, the apex court said that when a party claims adverse possession, they must know who the actual owner of the property is. “Secondly, he must plead that he was in open and uninterrupted possession for more than 12 years to the original owner’s knowledge. These material averments are completely absent in the plaint,” the SC said in its order dated March 18, 2024.