A law to legalise the illegal

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue. That was Oliver Goldsmith writing a long time ago. Looking at the Delhi Laws (Special Provisions) Act 2006, it appears that the laws in India do much more — they reward vice by legalising the violations of law committed with impunity by all concerned — the public, the building mafia, the local authorities and the politicians.

Clearly, the Government of India was in an unseemly hurry in legislating and passing the Act. Not only was it exempted from the mandatory seven-day notice for parliamentary consideration, it was extremely poorly drafted. Even the title of the legislation was misleading. It gave no idea about the purpose of the legislation. The law — which has just come into force — does not use the term “unauthorised constructions” anywhere. It prefers, instead, to deploy the phrase “unauthorised development”. The Bill’s statement of objects and reasons put a considerable spin on the issue. It argued that this law is necessary in order to enable the Government to take all possible measures for the “finalisation of norms, policy guidelines and feasible strategies” to deal with the problems of unauthorised constructions so that, as Section 3 of the Act says, the “development of Delhi can take place in a sustainable and planned manner”. Section 3 gives one year to the government to frame relevant policies. It prescribes “status quo as on the 1st day of January, 2006 shall be maintained in respect of categories of unauthorised development” mentioned in the law.

The law raises more questions than it answers. The problem of illegal constructions and encroachments is not a new one for Delhi. Why, then, does the government now require a year to design strategies to deal with the problem? How can we expect it to do so when it has not designed such strategies all these years? And why does it need a law to do this?

Laws relating to unauthorised constructions or their demolition have always been applied randomly and unequally. In Delhi, these matters are regulated as per the provisions of the Unified Building Bye-laws, 1983. The fact that the local authorities either did not enforce the bye-laws, or overlooked their violations, is obvious from the large-scale court-ordered sealing of illegal properties and their demolition. Jaipal Reddy, the Union urban development minister, even admitted in the Lok Sabha on March 6 that “the extent and magnitude of violations of unauthorised construction and misuse of premises is assessed to be huge and the number of families likely to be affected may be in lakhs”. Obviously, all this did not happen overnight, so why didn’t the government take action in time? That the demolition issue had come to such a sorry pass because of persistent political connivance and corruption, as some have pointed out, may be a part of the explanation.

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