Rajnarain Singh v Chairman, Patna Administration Committee (1954)

It is the companion to In re Delhi Laws Act and the case that shows where the line actually falls. Delhi Laws held that extending a whole enactment with minor modifications is lawful. Rajnarain Singh holds that picking a single section out of an enactment and applying it after modification is not, because selection is itself a choice of policy.

Section 3(1)(f) of the impugned Act "empowered the Patna local administration to select any provision of the Bengal Municipality Act and apply it to Patna area with such restrictions and modifications as the government may think fit." Acting under it, the Government "picked up Section 104 and after modification applied it to the town of Patna."

Whether a power to select provisions of another Act, modify them and apply them to a new area is a permissible delegation, or a delegation of the essential legislative function.

The delegation was ultra vires. The Supreme Court so declared "on the ground that the power to pick out a section for application to another area amounts to delegating the power to change the policy of the Act which is an essential legislative power, and hence-cannot be delegated." (read hence cannot)

The essential legislative function, as In re Delhi Laws Act defines it, is "laying down the policy of the law and enacting that policy into a binding rule of conduct". A statute is a scheme: its sections cohere, and the policy of the Act is expressed in the whole. To authorise an executive officer to choose which sections shall apply, and to modify them as he thinks fit, is to authorise him to compose a new policy out of the pieces of an old one. That is not working out details within the framework of a policy already laid down; it is settling the policy.

A delegated power to select individual provisions of an enactment and apply them, with modifications, to another area amounts to a delegated power to change the policy of the Act, and is therefore an unlawful delegation of an essential legislative function.

• Always cite it with In re Delhi Laws Act, and state the line between them: adopting another legislature's policy wholesale is lawful; composing a new policy out of selected pieces of it is not.
• It is also the authority behind Lachmi Narain's holding that a power of modification is subsidiary to the power of extension and cannot dilute the legislative policy embodied in the extended Act.