Sc Orders Transfer Of Plea On Shimla Plan From Hc, Legal News, ET LegalWorld – Legal Firms

The Supreme Court has ordered transfer of a pending case in the Himachal Pradesh high court that challenged the National Green Tribunal’s (NGT) recent decision of quashing the controversial Shimla Development Plan-2041.

The transferred case would now be heard in the Supreme Court.

The orders of transferring the case were passed by a bench of Justice B R Gavai, Justice Surya Kant and Justice J B Pardiwala.

“Since the issue is pending before this court, we direct that the petition ‘State of HP vs Yogendra Mohan Sengupta’ be withdrawn from the high court and transferred to this court,” states the order.

A petition filed by the Himachal Pradesh government challenging the NGT orders of 2017 banning all construction in Shimla’s core and green areas is already pending in the Supreme Court.

The Himachal Pradesh government had earlier this month challenged the NGT order of quashing its Shimla Development Plan (SDP) in the state high court and appealed the court to set it aside.

The state government in its petition had stated that the NGT, declaring the SDP as illegal, was “arbitrary, unreasonable, whimsical and beyond the ambit of NGT’s jurisdiction.”

The NGT on October 14 this year had quashed the SDP-2041 terming it illegal and in violation of the tribunal judgement of 2017 while observing that “there is illegal and ill- conceived effort to violate the binding directions of this Tribunal.”

Earlier, the Tribunal in May had stayed the SDP, around a month after the state cabinet had passed it.

The NGT orders have come on a petition filed by Shimla resident Yogendra Mohan Sengupta, who has been crusading to save Shimla from unauthorised construction and was also the original applicant in the 2017 landmark orders of the tribunal.

In its 2017 orders, the NGT had banned all constructions — residential, institutional, and commercial — in Shimla’s core and green areas and also capped the building height to two storeys plus attic floor in the non-core and non-green areas.

However, the SDP had proposed to allow constructions in Shimla’s most vulnerable areas, including green belts, the core area and even the sinking zone, in violation of the tribunal orders of 2017. The SDP had also proposed to allow relaxations in the building height and number of storeys.