NEW DELHI: The Delhi high court wants to know the number of properties under rent control in the city. Last week, a bench of Justices B D Ahmed and Sanjeev Sachdeva sought such a list from the Centre and state government.
HC is hearing a petition challenging the legality of the Delhi Rent Control Act on the ground it is an archaic peace of legislation violating fundamental rights of landlords.
While seeking records of the properties, located mostly in prime areas of the city, the landlords who own them receive a pittance of rent as the DRC Act 1957 places a bar on increasing rent from tenants, the court remarked it seems "tenants are smiling and landlords are crying" because of the law.
Appearing for an association of women landlords, advocate Shobha Aggarwal also drew the court's attention to a chart of minimum wage rate in Delhi.
She pointed out that about 50% of properties under rent control fetch a monthly rent less than even the daily minimum wage of an unskilled worker pegged at Rs 353 per day.
The petitioners also claimed that municipal corporations have admitted many properties in City Zone, Sadar Paharganj Zone, Karol Bagh Zone and Civil Lines don't pay tax. While the owners cannot afford to pay the tax as the rent received is negligible, the tenants also refuse to pay fearing that once they pay house-tax the property may come out of rent control.
The landlords claimed one of the culprits for financial crises of the corporations is their failure to extract house tax from such properties. They have alleged that tenants protected under the Act are determined by historical accident and not by need due to the peculiar nature of the legislation. "In fact, the poor are not getting any benefit out of the Act."
The petitioners had earlier argued that even after the 1988 Amendment, the object of expediting disputes between landlords and tenants was not achieved and cited a chart showing that, as of December 2014, 10.15% of all civil cases pending before the district courts in Delhi were as a result of the DRCA.
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