New Delhi: The Bombay high court has said it is not appropriate on the part of authorities to label people as “encroachers” to carry out demolitions of alleged encroached sites, for the scale of human displacement due to such drives is “beyond imagination”.
According to Livelaw, a two-judge bench of Justice Gautam Patel and Justice Neela Gokhale took objection to the demolition drive carried out by authorities to raze down 101 alleged illegal properties on Western Railways land in Mumbai. The court also noted that the drive was carried out without any survey and without even serving necessary notices to the people concerned under the Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants) Act, 1971.
While ordering authorities concerned not to carry out any further demolition in violation of Supreme Court norms, the bench asked them to be considerate in acting upon alleged encroachments.
“Throughout, we bear in mind that merely labelling these persons as ‘encroachers’ is not going to answer the problem. This is a serious problem in the city and it is a problem of human displacement. Sometimes, the scale of the displacement is beyond the imagination. It has to be addressed in a more considered fashion than by merely deploying bulldozers on the site,” the bench said, according to the legal news portal.
Responding to the petition filed by Ekta Welfare Trust, the bench noted that no rehabilitation package – expected under Prime Minister’s Awas Yojana Scheme (PMAYS) – was announced by the authorities for those whose houses had been demolished.
The court also pulled up authorities on the approach being followed to dispose debris generated from the demolitions. It said it does not approve of the “presumption” on part of authorities that discarding debris in a low-lying would automatically result in it washing away into the Arabian Sea.
The next hearing on the matter is scheduled for March 1.