‘Delhi In An Utter Mess’: Supreme Court Rebukes Centre; Know Why

New Delhi: The Supreme Court has pulled up the Centre, saying that Delhi is in an utter mess and the authorities are keeping everything in limbo.

Expressing its displeasure at the delay in notifying the Master Plan for Delhi (MPD) 2041, the apex court said: “We are surprised that the Government does not take steps to prevent harassment of citizens. An utter mess has been made in the city and the public authorities are not willing to remove this mess.”

The order of justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Sudhanshu Dhulia dated October 18 was uploaded on the Supreme Court’s website on Monday.

“The whole problem in the city is that public authorities are keeping everything in limbo to give themselves unreasonable powers,” the two-judge bench said. The Central government had committed to publish the Master Plan by April 30, 2023, but was already five months late, the top court pointed out.

“You don’t provide the Master Plan while you continue to harass citizens,” the bench said while considering two applications that sought orders to de-seal two premises on Rajesh Pilot Marg and Tilak Marg.

The two-judge bench directed the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) to de-seal the two premises.

The court-appointed judicial committee — comprising two retired high court judges — had last year approved the de-sealing of the premises on Rajesh Pilot Marg while the monitoring committee comprising experts assisting the court on sealing of unauthorised constructions recommended de-sealing the premises on Tilak Marg.

After NDMC opposed the orders, the occupants approached the top court.

The Central government and Delhi Development Authority (DDA) committed in September 2021 to finalise MPD-2041 by January 2023. The Supreme Court then gave the government three more months and recorded the April 30 deadline. But even that deadline hasn’t been met.

Warning NDMC, Supreme Court said in its order last week: “We have put counsel for the NDMC to notice that if such acts are repeated in future or if the orders (of judicial committee) are not implemented, we have no option but to have the concerned officers before the Court and we hope they will not give us an occasion to do so.”

At its September hearing last year, the court constituted a judicial committee comprising former chief justice of Bombay high court justice (retd) Pradeep Nandrajog and former Delhi high court judge, justice (retd) GS Sistani to deal with applications filed by owners and occupiers of premises sealed on orders of the court-appointed monitoring committee. Earlier, all these applications used to be filed directly to the Supreme Court. As applications piled up, the court found the situation unmanageable and decided to have a judicial authority to consider the objections and take a call if the order of sealing should be continued or set aside. The final order could be challenged before the top court.

Besides sealing, the judicial committee’s scope was extended to cover cases of regularization, levy of penalty or conversion charges, demolition of unauthorized constructions and removal of encroachments. It was further empowered to examine aspects of nature of allotment, change of allotment policy, prevalent norms on what is permissible and the nature of violation before passing orders.

In the present applications considered by the top court, one applicant was Parijat Sinha whose property at Sagar Apartments, Tilak Marg was ordered to be de-sealed while the other application was by a firm called Carvanserai Limited. In the latter case, the judicial committee passed an order on August 22 to de-seal while the Tilak Marg premises was ordered de-sealing by monitoring committee on January 21.