The Delhi Excessive Court docket on Friday disposed of a public curiosity litigation searching for the court docket’s intervention to analyze allegations of unauthorised sale, unlawful development, and encroachment in Christian graveyards within the Nationwide Capital.
The bench on Friday disposed of the plea with a path to the Union authorities by way of its secretary/property officer underneath the Ministry of Housing and City Affairs (MoHUA) to deal with the grievances within the petition as a illustration and resolve the identical in accordance with legislation.
Three petitioners, Cheryl Betsy Matthew, Aradhana Singh and Khushboo George, who’re advocates practising within the district courts of Delhi, moved the excessive court docket highlighting situations of “unlawful exhumation of mortal stays, unauthorised body-doubling, encroachment and the unwarranted sale of burial areas”.
The petitioners had approached the excessive court docket in October after a number of representations and complaints to the native Delhi authorities weren’t acted upon.
Of their petition, taken up earlier than the bench of Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora on Friday and Thursday, it was additionally submitted that graveyard committees, answerable for proudly owning/administering graveyards, “cost exorbitant quantities of cash for burial, for the land and companies which accompany such burial.” The petition alleges that the committee after allotting burial plots to households then “arbitrarily and with out consent of the bereaved household promote the burial plot or create third celebration pursuits, exhume our bodies, some buried simply 5 months in the past, within the identify of physique doubling, and impose that funeral companies be taken from their committees solely.”
Submitting that graveyards are public premises as understood underneath The Public Premises (Eviction of Unauthorised Occupants) Act, 1971, the petitioners submitted that the property officer has the rights vested in him to carry an inquiry into issues or complaints pertaining to unlawful encroachment. The petitioners have additionally submitted that civic authorities of the Municipal Company of Delhi (MCD) and the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) too are empowered to behave on complaints of encroachment.
The petitioners submitted, “State Authorities and Municipal Our bodies have grossly and in a bland style failed to guard Christian burial grounds from encroachments, unlawful gross sales and misuse by not performing on complaints, such delay in motion is a violation of the Proper to Apply Faith freely.”
Submitting that there are at the moment two main committees, specifically the Delhi Cemeteries Committee and the Indian Christian Cemetery Committee, which collectively administer six graveyards, the petitioners have alleged that “common shops and prescription drugs stand in full glory and honour, crowding the cemeteries’ bounds.”
The petition additionally alleged that “sale in components of burial grounds to companies and housing residences, when that is strictly towards legislation and order”, is being undertaken “to siphon off unaccounted colossal quantities of cash.”
