The Kerala High Court’s latest order on the Lulu Hypermarket land in Thrissur, delivered on 11 August 2026, has once again stalled M.A. Yusuff Ali’s long-delayed mall project in his home district. A Division Bench of Justice Devan Ramachandran and Justice Basant Balaji, deciding Writ Appeals 2369 and 2294 of 2025, upheld a single-judge ruling that quashed the Revenue Divisional Officer’s permissions to remove the land from the official paddy-land data bank. The court directed a fresh, strictly statutory review and set a tight timetable for it.
The dispute centres on 161.45 ares — roughly four acres — in Survey Numbers 403, 405 and 406 of Ayyanthole village. Lulu Hyper Market Pvt Ltd, part of the Lulu Group founded and headed by Yusuff Ali, had purchased the plot intending to build a shopping mall and hypermarket. The company argued the land had lost its agricultural character long before the Kerala Conservation of Paddy Land and Wetland Act, 2008, came into force and should never have been entered in the data bank. It filed Form-5 applications seeking deletion. The RDO allowed them without first calling for the mandatory report from the Agricultural Officer. Lulu then paid conversion fees under Section 27A and obtained further approval. Meanwhile the District Collector issued a Section 13 order directing restoration of the land to paddy status.
T.N. Mukundan, a local farmer and member of a statutory monitoring committee, challenged the RDO’s conversion orders. He produced subsidy registers and other records suggesting paddy was still being cultivated as late as 2022. Satellite images, Google Earth data and a village officer’s mahazar examined by the courts appeared to support that view. Yusuff Ali, born in Nattika in Thrissur district, has publicly blamed “political interference” for the delay, saying a case filed by a person linked to a political party has kept a project that could generate 3,000 jobs in limbo for years. Mukundan has insisted his fight is personal, not party-directed, and is aimed at protecting dwindling wetlands.
Justice Viju Abraham’s single-bench judgment of 27 August 2025 found the RDO had skipped a mandatory step under Rule 4 of the 2008 Rules. The judge quashed the RDO orders, directed a fresh decision after obtaining the Agricultural Officer’s report plus an authenticated satellite-imagery analysis from the Kerala State Remote Sensing and Environment Centre (KSRSEC), ordered refund of the conversion fees, and kept the Collector’s restoration direction in abeyance. Lulu appealed.
On 11 August 2026 the Division Bench agreed that the statutory sequence cannot be short-circuited. “Once an application under Form 5 is preferred… the RDO has to call for a report from the Agricultural Officer; and then, on receiving the same, to proceed to dispose of the said application, after making a personal inspection, or relying upon the report of the KSRSEC, or both,” the judges wrote. “The procedure… is statutorily ordained and cannot be, in any manner, tinkered by us.” They refused to treat the fresh KSRSEC report already placed before them as conclusive enough to decide the matter themselves. They also set aside the Collector’s restoration order, holding that such a direction could not stand while the basic question of whether the land was illegally converted remained unresolved.
The 11 August 2026 judgment has now set a clear timetable: KSRSEC must forward its reports to the authorised officer within two weeks; the Agricultural Officer must submit a report within one month; and the RDO must decide the Form-5 applications within one month of receiving that report. Interim protections continue until then.
The ruling does not declare the land paddy or non-paddy. It simply insists that the law’s procedural safeguards — designed to prevent hasty conversion of wetlands — must be followed before any commercial use is permitted. For Yusuff Ali, whose Lulu Group already operates large malls in Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram, the Thrissur project remains on hold more than a year after the first High Court setback. For Mukundan and conservationists, the Division Bench order of 11 August 2026 is a reminder that even a billionaire investor from the district itself cannot bypass the statutory process. The next chapter will be written by the Agricultural Officer’s report and the RDO’s fresh decision. Until then, four acres in Ayyanthole stay in legal limbo.