On Wednesday, the Apex Court decided to evolve a mechanism to stop mindless regularisation of illegal colonies and unauthorised structures by seeking responses from the Centre & states on a Public Interest Litigation which sought geo-mapping of all areas to stop this practice which messes up civic facilities. Appearing for petitioner J Sagar Rao, advocate Sravan Kumar told a bench of Justices L Nageswara Rao, Hemant Gupta and Ajay Rastogi that Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu had passed orders this year legalising massive clusters of illegal colonies & unauthorised constructions for generating extra revenue without sparing a thought about the chaos it would cause in town & city planning, not to speak of disruption in civic facilities. The bench realised that the problem was a pan-India one & not restricted to the states mentioned in the plea.
The Supreme Court had tried to deal with the issue of regularisation of unauthorised colonies & constructions some fifteen years ago but had little success. The bench asked the petitioner to make all states & UTs parties, issued notices to them & asked them to reply to PIL within 8 weeks. The PIL seeks extension of Supreme Court’s earlier direction to Maharashtra Govt for geo-mapping of all municipal & urban areas to enable authorities to detect unauthorised constructions. The petitioner said Telangana, Andhra Pradesh & Tamil Nadu had been regularisation “illegal layouts”. “Nomenclature of the orders itself shows that the governments are regularising the illegal act committed by the real estate mafia with the help of government officials in these states,” the petitioner said. “Regularisation schemes have been repeatedly implemented by these states for structures & layouts situated in eco-sensitive zones, elephant corridors, reserve forest, water bodies, roads, drains, nalas etc, which will cause immense damage to the environment, planned development & cause traffic jams, heavy pollution, stagnation of drainage, shrinking of water bodies, urban flooding, shortage of drinking water & unsustainable population density in civic areas,” the petitioner added. He claimed that Telangana’s regularisation scheme had received massive response.
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