The Madras High Court on Wednesday granted time till September 20 for a private matriculation school to file its response to a plea made by DMK president M.K. Stalin’s son Udhayanidhi Stalin and 13 others, to declare a lane at Peter’s Road in Royapettah here as a private lane meant for the exclusive use of Indira Garden residents.
Justice M. Govindaraj adjourned the hearing after two weeks, at the request of a counsel for the school against which Mr. Udhayanidhi and other plaintiffs had also sought an interim injunction, restraining it from using the lane as a public passage by parking its vehicles and thereby hindering ingress and egress for those residing in Indira Garden.
The main relief sought for in the civil suit was to declare the 18-ft-wide and 264-ft-long lane, which provides access to the residents to Peter’s Road, as a private property. They also wanted to declare illegal, a communication sent by a zonal officer of the Chennai Corporation to the school principal on May 3, 2013, stating that the lane was actually a public property.
In the suit filed in 2016, the plaintiffs had urged the court to issue a direction to the Corporation to remove the electric lamp posts that it had erected on the lane. They further insisted on declaring illegal, the breaking of the school’s compound wall abutting the lane for fixing a gate and sought a consequential direction to the school to close the gate permanently.
A plaint, filed in support of the suit, stated that DMK’s former president M. Karunanidhi’s daughters-in-law Kanthi Alagiri, T. Mohanambal and Durgavathi Stalin had jointly purchased 4,323 sq.ft. of property at Indira Garden on December 15, 1989. Subsequently, Ms. Stalin purchased the shares of the other two owners on May 27, 2003 and became the absolute owner.
On November 10, 2004, she gave away 584.45 sq.ft. of land to her son Mr. Udhayanidhi, thereby making him one of the owners of the properties situated at Indira Garden. Similarly, the plaintiffs described their ownership detailsand jointly contended that the lane leading to their properties had remained a private lane since 1890.
However, in 2013, CSI Monahan Matriculation High School demolished a portion of its compound wall abutting the lane and fixed a gate over there, on the strength of a communication received by it from the zonal officer of the Greater Chennai Corporation, forcing the residents to file the present civil suit, they said.