NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday decided to evolve a mechanism to stop mindless regularisation of illegal colonies and unauthorised structures by seeking responses from the Centre and states on a PIL which sought geo-mapping of all areas to stop this practice which messes up civic facilities. Appearing for petitioner J Sagar Rao, advocate Sravan Kumar told a bench of Justices L Nageswara Rao, Hemant Gupta and Ajay Rastogi that Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Tamil Nadu had passed orders this year legalising massive clusters of illegal colonies and unauthorised constructions for generating extra revenue without sparing a thought about the chaos it would cause in town and city planning, not to speak of disruption in civic facilities. The bench realised that the problem was a pan-India one and not restricted to the states mentioned in the petition.
The apex court had tried to deal with the issue of regularisation of unauthorised colonies and constructions some 15 years ago but had little success. The bench asked the petitioner to make all states and UTs parties, issued notices to them and asked them to reply to PIL within eight weeks. The PIL seeks extension of SC’s earlier direction to Maharashtra government for geo-mapping of all municipal and urban areas to enable authorities to detect unauthorised constructions. The petitioner said Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu had been regularisation “illegal layouts”. “Nomenclature of the orders itself shows that the governments are regularising the illegal act committed by the real estate mafia with the help of government officials in these states,” the petitioner said. “Regularisation schemes have been repeatedly implemented by these states for structures and layouts situated in eco-sensitive zones, elephant corridors, reserve forest, water bodies, roads, drains, nalas etc, which will cause immense damage to the environment, planned development and cause traffic jams, heavy pollution, stagnation of drainage, shrinking of water bodies, urban flooding, shortage of drinking water and unsustainable population density in civic areas,” the petitioner added. He claimed that Telangana’s regularisation scheme had received massive response.