INDU BHAN
The Financial Express
New Delhi: Criticising the Uttar Pradesh government for acquiring prime agricultural land in Noida Extension to build luxury flats, the Supreme Court on Monday refused to give any interim relief to the developers who had sought a stay on the Allahabad High Court judgment denotifying the acquisition. The apex court also asked the developers to return the land to its owners.
Questioning the invocation of an urgency clause by the Mayawati government that bars farmers from raising objections, a vacation bench headed by justice P Sathasivam said the matter needed to be examined so as to prevent situations similar to Nandigram (West Bengal), where the invocation of such an urgency clause had led to violence by farmers.“Whose residential use are these flats for? Who is building them? What are the prices?.. We want to go into details of the case. This urgency clause is not automatically invoked... We do not want more Nandigrams,” the court observed.
“We will not keep our eyes closed. You take it (agricultural land) from one side and give it to the other. This has to go and if it does not go this court will step in to ensure that. Was any effort made to find alternative lands before acquiring agricultural land?” the bench observed during the hearing of four appeals filed by the Uttar Pradesh government, the Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority (GNIDA) and two developers — Supertech and Amrapali.
The Mayawati government had allegedly acquired 57 acre in Shahberi village without any public hearing in 2009.
Under Sections 4-9 of the Land Acquisition Act, the government has to notify the land it wants to acquire in public interest, invite public response and hold a public hearing. Then it has to pay the compensation and issue a gazette order. In this case, the administration allegedly skipped the public hearing and acquired the land under the ‘emergency’ clause for industrial development. But instead of industrial development, the administration handed over a chunk of the land to builders including Supertech, Mahagun and Amrapali. These builders immediately opened offices, got their maps approved and starting accepting bookings for flats.
The builders challenged the high court order dated May 12 that had set aside the state government’s notifications issued on June 10 and November 9 last year to acquire the land, and all consequential actions taken by the Authority with regard to the land. The petitions said the land was acquired under the Builders Residential Scheme for a planned development as against the haphazard and unauthorised development made by the unofficial owners.
The petitions added that the high court failed to notice that only a handful of the respondents were tenure-holders and most of them were either unauthorised developers, plot-holders or purchasers of plots intending to carry out unauthorised constructions over the land in dispute.
Amrapali Smart City stated that the high court failed to notice that out of the total 156.903 hectares acquired, owners of nearly 70% of the land had not challenged the acquisition proceedings, while out of the 211 landowners, as many as 111 had accepted the compensation.
“The high court erred in not noticing that Shahberi village was notified as part of Greater Noida as early as February 21, 1994 and as such there could not have been any inter se sale transactions contrary to the provisions of the UP Industrial Area Development Act, 1976,” the petitions filed on behalf of counsel ADN.Rao stated. According to Rao, swapping of land use is permitted in the master plan provided the percentage of land use in each category (namely industrial, commercial and residential or green belt) is maintained.
No comments:
Post a Comment