Most tenancy disputes come down to money and months: what rent was agreed, what has been paid, for which period, and whether anything is due. Receipts answer those questions on paper. Rent in arrears is one of the grounds on which a landlord may seek eviction under section 6 of the West Bengal Premises Tenancy Act, 1997, and a tenant who can show every month paid has met that ground before it is argued. A landlord’s own counterfoils serve the same purpose from the other side, since they show the rate of rent and who has been paying it.
Cash is where the difficulty lies. Rent paid in cash with nothing in writing leaves one person’s word against another’s, and a court decides on evidence, not on who sounds more certain. Payment by bank transfer or UPI, with the month named in the reference, leaves its own record. Where rent is paid in cash, a signed receipt on the same day is the safeguard, and it should be asked for every time, not only when a quarrel begins.
A useful receipt is short and complete. It gives the date, the amount, the month or period it covers, the address of the premises, the names of the landlord and the tenant, and the mode of payment, and it is signed by the person who received the money. Rent and security deposit should never share a receipt without saying which is which. Keep the receipts together and in order; a run of them over several years also shows the rent at which the tenancy has actually continued.
Receipts do other work too. They show who is in occupation and since when, which matters when a landlord dies or a building is sold and the new owner or the heirs want to know on what terms the tenant holds. Employers commonly ask for them before allowing house rent allowance, and they are a record of address.
If a landlord refuses to accept rent, or accepts it and will not give a receipt, the answer is not to stop paying, because unpaid rent is itself a ground for eviction. Section 21 of the Act provides a procedure: tender the rent, send it by postal money order, and if it is still not accepted, deposit it with the Rent Controller, keeping the receipt for each step. See Tenancy, landlord & tenant.
This note describes the general position only. How a particular tenancy is governed, and what its papers prove, depends on its history and the law that applies to it, and nothing here is legal advice.