HC’s strictures empowers Tamil Nadu to be tough on evictions

CHENNAI: Whether it’s a hamlet or township in Tamil Nadu or in the heart of the city, the Madras High Court had never shown any leniency to encroachers of the waterbody. Nor has it entertained the Government’s offer of providing alternate facilities to people who occupied the waterbodies.

When encroachments were removed from Govindasamy Nagar in RA Puram, there were voices that supported the residents saying that the Government should have considered the residents’ economic status and allowed them to continue living there.

However, the HC was not persuaded by that reasoning in the encroachment case. When a litigant filed a petition seeking direction to remove encroachments in Chinnakuttai pond in Palladam, Tiruppur, on March 23 this year, the Additional Advocate General J Ravindran informed HC that residents were living below poverty line and that the Government was working towards providing them with alternate land.

On hearing the submissions, the first bench turned against the contention of the State that “poverty cannot be grounds for encroaching Government land and water bodies”. It also passed an order to the Registration department not to register any land which has been classified as water bodies.

The HC ordered Tangedco and the Municipality Administration and Water Supply department not to provide electricity and water connections to the encroachers. The Chief Justice had instructed the State to take stringent action against encroachers, and also suspend officers who had failed to prevent encroachments.

While hearing the Injambakkam’s Bethal Nagar encroachment case in February, Chief Justice Munishwar Nath Bhandari also made an observation against reclassifying waterbodies as housing lands.

“The court will never allow the Government to regularise encroached lands. Providing alternate lands to the encroachers is also an act of encouraging people to occupy waterbodies, grazing lands and other government lands,” the CJ noted.

On various occasions, the HC had come down heavily on officers who failed to protect the water bodies and prevent encroachments. Starting from the Tahsildars, the HC had even summoned the Chief Secretary in the cases of waterbody encroachments.

When the city had experienced unprecedented rainfall in December 2021, and massive flooding had deadlocked the State capital, the then Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee came down heavily on the State.

He warned the Greater Chennai Corporation that the court would initiate contempt proceedings if action was not taken to prevent floods in Chennai.

On December 8, 2021, the first bench of Madras HC summoned Chief Secretary V Irai Anbu to appear before the court for not filing the details of the waterbodies’ encroachments in the State. Since the CS filed 20,000 pages of documentation that had details of encroachments in the State, the first bench dispensed with his CS.

According to the CS, about 44,707 acres of water bodies have been encroached and 4,682 buildings were constructed on water bodies in all the 313 Taluks of the State.

The State government had also informed the Madras HC that an umbrella act will be brought to prevent waterbody encroachments in TN. “Even as the Tamil Nadu Protection of Tanks and Eviction of Encroachments Act, 2007 and Tamil Nadu Land Encroachment Act, 1905, are available to check encroachments, they need to be updated with an umbrella law,” the Chief Justice submitted through the Advocate General R Shanmugasundaram.

The Government also submitted that GPS and GIS technologies will be used to monitor water bodies to prevent encroachments.