Gurgaon: A group of plot owners has moved Supreme Court against a Punjab and Haryana High Court order on Sept 7 that allowed town and country planning department to act against building violations in licensed colonies that are within the corporation’s area.A high court bench of justices Ashwani Kumar Mishra and Rohit Kapoor had rejected the contention that the director, town and country planning, and the district town planner (enforcement) lose jurisdiction when a licensed colony falls within a municipal corporation area.HC held that Haryana Development and Regulation of Urban Areas Act, 1975, applies to all urban areas in the state, including land inside municipal limits. It said the department’s powers flow from the licence granted to a colony, not from land lying outside municipal limits, and are therefore unaffected by municipalisation.Haryana Municipal Act, 1973 and Haryana Municipal Corporation Act, 1994, it said, transferred only powers under the 1963 controlled-areas law, not those under 1975 Act.The petitioners, pointing to a June 2, 2008 govt notification extending MCG’s boundaries to include licensed colonies, have argued that provisions of Municipal Corporation Act apply to an area unless it is specifically excluded. They have cited the 2012 Rajat Kuchhal vs State of Haryana case in which HC had held that DTCP director loses jurisdiction over erstwhile controlled areas once they become municipal areas.The town and country planning department has been carrying out large-scale demolition and sealing exercises in the city’s colonies, citing right-of-way clearance. It has found rampant violations, such as 6-7-storey buildings being built on plots allotted for poor families, but has also drawn accusations of not carrying out the exercise homogeneously across colonies.
