Above, The Law

Once Upon A Pond

• PIL claims UP built the new Lucknow bench building of the HC on a pond

• UP government says it cannot throw away Rs 1,500 crore

• SC held ponds to be protected under right to life (Article 21)

• Ponds can dry up and shrink during arid seasons and drought

• SC has asked governments to manage and develop ponds that lie in disuse

• The same HC has ruled against misuse of ponds in other cases

• Land laws in UP also prevent conversion of ponds

• Environmentalists warn this will affect microclimate and harm overall ecology

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“It is unique in the world. Even the courts in the UK or the US do not have such splendid premises. Indeed, the Supreme Court and all other high court buildings fade in grandeur.”

Thus gushed the chief justice of India while accepting the Uttar Pradesh government’s “gift” of a spanking new and extravagant building in Gomti Nagar for the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court, on March 19. And grand it surely is. CJI Tirath Singh Thakur then went on to rem­ind both judges and lawyers that the building had been built with the hard-earned money of taxpayers and that citizens would now expect expeditious justice. No excuses about infrastructural bottlenecks would now be acceptable, he quipped.

UP CM Akhilesh Yadav’s Rs 1,500-crore ‘gift’ is truly stupendous. He seems to have gone the whole hog as he was fulfilling the promise his father Mulayam Singh Yadav had made around a decade ago, during his last term as CM. The four-storey building spans across a 40-acre plot on Faizabad Road and boasts a three-tier underground parking for 2,000 cars and 15,000 two-­wheelers. It has escalators, guest rooms, a club house and a canteen, besides a sitting room for drivers. The building also has 57 courtrooms and 72 judges’ chambers, though only 21 judges are currently pos­ted to the Lucknow bench. The planners have also provided for 1,440 lawyer’s chambers and 2,240 typists.

Indeed, the new courthouse appears bigger and grander than the apex court itself. The court complex has a well-lit lawn, swanky lobbies, extensive woodwork all over the building, concealed ceiling lighting and a gym. A lawyer in Lucknow describes it as the proverbial “Raja Bhoj ka mahal” and wondered how comfortable an ordinary litigant would feel while approaching this majestic, opulent and intimidating building for justice.

Locally, however, it is not the building but what might lie beneath the 40-acre plot that has become the talking point. The Uttar Pradesh government may have built the swanky new building on a water body—“nat­ure’s bounty”, which, the Supreme Court had said, needs to be protected under Article 21 (the fundamental right to life and personal liberty) of the Constitution in its landmark decision in the Hinch Lal Tiwari case (2001).

“A pond may have existed a long time ago, maybe 50 years ago, and dried up later. Now that area is arid,” says senior advocate Bulbul Godiyal, who has been app­earing in the case as the additional advocate general for the UP government. “In any case, do you want the government to throw away the Rs 1,500 crore it spent on the new building of the high court?”

Godiyal tells Outlook that “several writ petitions have been filed about this issue”. Some of these petitions claim that the high court building was constructed on a pond in violation of a standing Supreme Court ruling and laws banning construction on water bodies in the area. In this case, there is some mystery surrounding the pond in ‘khasra’ no. 42, which is there on revenue records but can’t seem to be located on the ground.

Uttar Pradesh is the most populous state in India and its capital, as can be expected, is bursting at the seams trying to accommodate government buildings, residential spaces, cultural complexes and an ever-­migrating and booming population. Around a decade ago, government buildings came up in the northeastern part of Lucknow, with piped water and other utilities. This was followed closely by private realtors turning it into a concrete jungle, displacing local singhara (water chestnut) growers despite their resistance.

The government allotted land for the new high court building bang in the middle of the new sea of high-rises. Social activist Ashok Shankaram, a resident of Gomti Nagar, noticed that several plots that included ponds were being fenced and the ponds were being filled. He went on to file several “revenue FIRs” and Right to Information (RTI) queries asking where the old ponds were. It was during this exercise that he stumbled upon pond no. 42, where he thinks the new high court building now stands.

In October 2012, Shankaram filed an RTI application asking for the site map of the Lucknow bench building of the high court. The map (part of the set of documents rev­iewed by Outlook) is sketchy on detail and does not have a plot number (exc­ept the legend ‘HCL’, which perhaps indicates ‘high court land’). A quarter of the site map is outlined, somewhat ambiguously, as ‘lowland.’ While a major chunk of the 40-acre plot was reserved for the high court building, the remaining portion was allotted to two private realtors, who are constructing buildings on their res­pective plots. Nor is there any mention of a plot number on the sale deed by which the Lucknow Development Authority (LDA) transferred the land to the government for the high court’s construction.

In fact, although the size and demarcations of the plot are described to the inch, the plot or ‘khasra’ number doesn’t seem to appear anywhere except for the letters T-C/HCL, where HCL perhaps means high court land. This only strengthens the theory that pond no. 42 existed where the new building has been erected.

The irony may be that Shankaram filed a PIL to the same high court in 2013, all­eging illegal conversion and allotment of the ponds. He relied on the 2001 Hinch Lal Tiwari case where the apex court had directed state authorities to protect the ponds and to develop them where water bodies have shrunk over time.

Shankaram’s petition has not progressed too far. On October 8, 2013, the government parties were directed to file their replies to the petition. On November 20, 2013, and January 6, 2014, the high court granted LDA more time to file its reply. The last time the petition was listed for hearing was in August 2015 after Shankaram moved an application. The matter has not been brought up since, exc­ept in a contempt-of-court case rec­ently. Meanwhile, construction activity was accelerated since CM Akhilesh Yadav wanted the building completed before the UP assembly elections due in 2017. The snail’s pace could be explained, perhaps, by the fact that the high court has only 80 judges (including the Lucknow bench) against a sanctioned strength of 160.

In March this year, a different bench of the same court heard a similar PIL filed by the Bharat Kisan Union Awadh, a farmers’ organisation. In that case, the state government’s archaeological department and district administration had also surveyed the plot in question, established that a pond did exist and directed the LDA to let the pond be. Based on this, the Lucknow bench stayed construction on an existing pond.

The high court building case moved at a more slothful pace. The state government responded through its tehsildar, who filed a brief affidavit shifting the onus to the LDA. The development authority, however, is yet to file a reply to the petition. When LDA vice-chairman Satyendra Singh did not respond to telephone calls, Outlook visited his office. Singh’s aide said he was busy in meetings and “did not have time for the press”.

Venkatesh Dutta, assistant professor in the department of environmental science, Ambedkar University, Lucknow, has used new maps superimposed on older ones from the 1970s and ’80s to demonstrate how water bodies have been colonised with construction activities. “In 1955, there were 3,000 ponds and now the number has officially gone down to 600-655,” he says. “As common lands, including ponds, do not belong to anyone, there is a problem of regulation and ens­uring integrity becomes the least priority when land comes at a premium.”

Lucknow-based advocate A.P. Ojha says, “When you define a pond, it is not just the catchment area but also the soil around it which must be protected.”

Shankaram has now asked the registrar of the Allahabad High Court to transfer the case to the National Green Tribunal. Meanwhile, in his letter to the chief justice of India, advocate Umesh Chandra Singh, also a resident of Gomti Nagar, has pointed out that if the matter was not looked into soon enough, the high court would be dispensing justice while sitting on disputed property.

By Ushinor Majumdar in Lucknow