With over 1,600 cases pending in the Bombay High Court (HC), the Supreme Court on July 30 directed the HC to initiate suo motu proceedings and audit the Maharashtra Slum Areas (Improvement, Clearance and Redevelopment) Act, 1971 to understand implementation problems. The judgment was given on the basis of an appeal filed by Yash Developers who moved the apex court against the 2022 verdict issued by the Bombay High Court terminating the developer’s slum redevelopment project in Borivali.
According to the Bench of justices PS Narasimha and Aravind Kumar, “The Executive branch has a constitutional duty to ensure that the purpose and object of a statute is accomplished while implementing it. It has the additional duty to closely monitor the working of a statute and must have a continuous and a real time assessment of the impact that the statute is having.”
Referring to the National Judicial Data Grid (NJDG) data, the Bench highlighted that 4,488 cases related to the slum redevelopment Act have been filed with the HC and disposed of in the last 20 years. The Bench mentioned that over 1,612 cases related to the slum redevelopment Act are pending before the HC. Out of these, around 135 cases are more than a decade old.
The Bench highlighted that it is difficult to identify and declare land as slum and the process of identifying slum dwellers was a complicated process. However, these problems under the policy framework should have come under Maharashtra government’s purview.
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