New Delhi, May 1:After years of non-intervention, the Ministry of Urban Development has stiffly opposed allotment of any additional land to the Delhi High Court, which has already added 9.69 acres to the original allotment of 7.89 acres it received in 1968.

A confrontation is brewing during on-going hearings of a public interest litigation filed by the Delhi High Court Bar Association. While the ministry has questioned further allotment of land, the petitioners, during oral arguments, have demanded an additional 20 acres in the Kaka Nagar area for various expansion projects of the High Court.

Interestingly, this demand of 20 acres comes at a time when 2.8 acres is finally being leveled for use of the High Court and for which eight C1 and C-11 type government bungalows and an NDMC school have recently been demolished in the Bapa Nagar area. Two senior bureaucrats (a retired special secretary and a deputy director general in the DRI), who received eviction orders before the Bapa Nagar demolitions, filed applications during the PIL case hearings pleading for an extension of their allotments, but were not heeded to.

Officials in the UD Ministry say that due to frequent demands for additional land, Additional Solicitor General Vikas Singh has been put on the case. The ASJ has now demanded that the Bar Association provide details of utilisation of the 2.8 acres as well as explain why the unutilised 45,000 square meters of floor area ratio (calculated against provisions of Delhi’s new master plan) cannot be used for the expansion proposals.

The members of the Bar Association, however, say they may not oblige the UD Ministry. Association Secretary D.K. Sharma told The Indian Express that details of the current allotment have previously been submitted to the government and that they would not give up their demand for an additional 20 acres that’s needed for the construction of additional lawyers chambers, consultation rooms, a library, a new parking lot and crèche.

“We have already submitted a proposal for the construction of these facilities in a new High Court campus proposed to be built in the Kaka Nagar area. The existing government bungalows located in the land can be demolished in batches specially since they are crumbling anyways. The first block earmarked by us has 18 bungalows,” said the DHCBA secretary.

The bunch of petitions filed in the case reveal that the Delhi High Court had also recently demanded 7 additional acres for a new record room (with a capacity for 20 lakh files) but this too had been frowned upon by the UD Ministry. Things came to a head when yet another demand for an acre was made, this time, for construction of an electric sub-station in Bapa Nagar. This matter has apparently been resolved with the UD Ministry recommending that the sub-station be located in the extra 2.8 acres given to the High Court.

In an affidavit filed on behalf of the UD Ministry, the Land and Development Officer has been informing the High Court that it “might not be possible to allot residential plots for requirements of the Delhi High Court, keeping in view the requirement of space for increased court activities, the possibility of providing other alternative institutional plots shall be examined.”

To strengthen its case against the continuous expansion of the Delhi High Court, the ministry has been pointing out that the land being demanded was located in the Lyutens Zone and that the government was already facing a crippling shortage of Government accommodation. One annexure submitted to court for the court calculates the shortage of C-1 Type Government bungalows as 374 and C-11 as 1297.

The plot

7.89 acres: Original allotment, 1968

2.04 acres: Construction of lawyers chambers, 1975

1.34 acres: Construction of administrative block and chambers, 1994

0.52 acres: New building, 1995

2.40 acres: Parking lot, 2001

0.54 acres: Construction of administrative building, 2004

2.85 acres: Lawyers chambers, consultation rooms, 2007

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