Chennai: The Madras high court has ordered issuance of contempt notice to the member secretary of Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA), calling upon him as to why it should not proceed against him in accordance with law for willful disobedience of the orders of the court in the matter relating to unauthorised constructions in the city.
Granting one week to file his response, a division bench comprising Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice R. Mahadevan directed the contemnor (C. Vijayaraj Kumar, member secretary,CMDA) to be present in the court on November 16.
Pointing out that the meetings of the monitoring committee (constituted to look into the issue of regularization of unauthorized buildings) were not held, despite a specific direction from HC to convene a monthly meeting, the bench said a meeting of the monitoring committee is directed to be called within 7 days and orders passed by this court to be placed before the committee.
Passing orders on a batch of petitions from T. Saravanan and others, the bench said, “We regret to note that practically no part of our direction in our order dated July 18, 2016, has been complied with”. The rules and guidelines with the recommendations of the Justice Rajeswaran committee have not been notified and we had clearly recorded in our earlier order that one final opportunity was granted to finalise the same within 3 months, failing which we would proceed further, as per our earlier direction, the bench added.
Pointing out that it had already clarified in its earlier order the legal position relating to section 113-C of the Tamil Nadu Town and Country Planning Act relating to regularisation of buildings violating approved plans, the bench said, “In view of our earlier observations on this matter, we have not noticed any progress in notifying the rules and even meetings are not being called.”
The bench said, “The convening authority for the monitoring committee is the member secretary, CMDA. Compliance report filed pertains, to only the cut-off date prescribed as February 28th, 1999 for regularisation and data shows only 2 per cent of the applications have been approved and 86 per cent have been rejected. What happens to the buildings whose applications have been rejected and the other is about provision introduced wide section 113-C of the Act”
