Question

Under the scheme of the Code of Civil Procedure, 1908, where proceedings are pending before a competent civil court, and an application is made seeking transfer of the case from one district to another district within the state, such transfer may be ordered:

• A. Only after conclusion of trial.
• B. Only by the court in which the suit is pending.
• C. By the High Court.
• D. Only upon agreement between the parties.

Hint:

Remember: Transfer of cases is generally exercised by superior courts. Different districts within the same State usually point toward the High Court's transfer jurisdiction.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is C

The cleanest way to answer this is to compare what a District Court can do with what only the High Court can do under the Code's transfer scheme. A District Court's transfer power under Section 24 is confined to suits pending in courts subordinate to it, all of which sit within its own district. Once the transfer crosses into another district, that power runs out and only the High Court can step in.

1. Only after conclusion of trial: The Code attaches no such condition to the transfer power; it can be exercised while the suit is still pending, at any convenient stage, so this option invents a restriction the Code does not contain.
2. Only by the court in which the suit is pending: That court is simply a party to the transfer, the one losing the case, not the authority deciding whether to move it; a court cannot be both the subject of the transfer application and its own supervising authority.
3. By the High Court: Since the sending court and the receiving court sit in different districts, the request falls outside a District Court's own-district reach and lands squarely within the High Court's State-wide supervisory reach, exactly where the Code places inter-district transfers.
4. Only upon agreement between the parties: The transfer power exists so that a court can act even when the parties disagree, for instance where one side is being harassed by repeated adjournments or where convenience genuinely demands a move; making it agreement-only would defeat that purpose.

Comparing the District Court's own-district reach against the High Court's State-wide reach shows that only the High Court can order a transfer between courts of two different districts.

Answer 2

Thinking about where such a transfer application is actually filed, and who has the administrative authority to act on it, is a practical way to reach the answer.

1. Only after conclusion of trial: Litigants file transfer applications precisely because continuing before a particular court has become inconvenient or unfair right now; waiting for the trial to finish would make the relief pointless, since the entire trial would already have taken place before the wrong court, so the Code allows the application at any stage.
2. Only by the court in which the suit is pending: A litigant seeking transfer is, in effect, asking to be moved away from that very court; it would be an unusual scheme for the Code to make that same court the sole decision-maker on whether it should lose the case, and indeed the Code does not do so.
3. By the High Court: A litigant seeking to move a suit from a court in one district to a court in another district within the State files the application before the High Court, since the High Court is the one authority with administrative and supervisory control running across every district in that State.
4. Only upon agreement between the parties: If agreement were required, the party benefiting from the current, perhaps inconvenient, forum could simply refuse consent and block any transfer forever, which would make the entire provision meaningless in exactly the contested cases it is meant to address.

Tracing where such an application would practically be filed and decided confirms that inter-district transfer within a State is a matter for the High Court.

The correct answer is therefore By the High Court.