NEW DELHI: Expressing concern over unauthorized constructions in the national capital, the Supreme Court on Wednesday said not a single brick can be laid without the connivance of the local police and municipal officials.
The top court said there should be a judicial inquiry into these cases and said it would constitute a judicial committee of two retired judges to deal with the decisions of the monitoring committee set up to probe illegal constructions.
Unauthorized constructions are carried out in collaboration between the authorities and the builders. The court observed that large scale construction is going on and no brick can be laid without the connivance of local police officers and municipal officials.
A bench of Justices SK Kaul and MM Sundaresh observed that when an officer changes, no one accepts responsibility and says that it happened during the tenure of the previous officer. There must be some way to deal with this. Any suggestions to deal with this? We have become a trial court in the process. I am not saying that this court should withdraw from the matter. There should be a judicial inquiry into these cases which can help us.
The apex court said that efforts to regulate illegal constructions by sending them to the Tribunal or the Delhi High Court do not yield the right results and thus the matter remains in court.
On analyzing the facts of each case, we believe that this is not the function of the Supreme Court. The number of applications has become so high that it is difficult to find the time to deal with them.