Delhi high court tells MCD to improve ways to raze illegal construction

The Delhi high court on Friday directed the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) commissioner to file a personal affidavit stating how the civic body plans to improve the methods of sealing and demolishing unauthorised construction. The court also expressed displeasure over the agency’s failure to abide by repeated orders to change its means of regulating the menace of illegal constructions in the city.
A bench of acting chief justice Manmohan and justice Tushar Rao Gedela directed the MCD commissioner to file an affidavit, after perusing some photographs which showed that the agency was still sealing buildings by “way of a thread” and carrying out “cosmetic” demolition by drilling holes in ceilings.
“Your department is incorrigible. Everything cannot be an industry. How much can you make? The problem is at your end. It is not on someone else’s end. You don’t change your ways,” the bench said to the MCD’s counsel.
The bench added: “This court has repeatedly asked the MCD commissioner to change the methods of sealing and demolition; however, it appears that nothing has changed at the ground level. Let the MCD commissioner file a personal affidavit stating as to how MCD shall improve the sealing and demolition process.”
The court was responding to a plea filed by one Rahul Kumar, alleging that unauthorised and illegal constructions concerning a property situated in Freedom Fighter Enclave in South Delhi were carried out in violation of building by-laws, without approved sanction plans.
The order comes days after the high court on August 13 censured MCD over its failure to regulate unauthorised construction in Delhi, as well as its failure to implement the court’s orders and said that negligence on the part of civic body officials to exercise supervision resulted in complete “mayhem” in the city.
The same bench opined that the officials “lacked moral courage” and authority to pass an order and get it implemented.
Expressing displeasure over the officials carrying out “cosmetic demolition” by puncturing the roof or putting a seal by tying a thread around the building, the court stressed that there was some deep reason and malice behind such dereliction.
While transferring the probe into the deaths of three IAS aspirants at Old Rajendra Nagar to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the high court had earlier this month lambasted MCD over its failure to implement the court’s order regarding setting up a mechanism to ensure “systematic, transparent, and even-handed” action against complaints of such construction.
In July, the high court reprimanded the MCD commissioner over illegal and unauthorised constructions in Delhi and said that courts were being used as a “pawns.” It said that one of the reasons for flooding in Delhi was the blockage of water outlets in the Capital due to illegal construction and asked the civic body chief to take stern action against the errant officers.
To be sure, the high court even in November last year, said that the civic administration in the Capital has failed to regulate and has “turned a blind eye” towards unauthorised construction.