The Madras High Court on Thursday decided to undertake a deeper examination of legal as well as environmental aspects related to the State government and its entities having sold lands, classified as waterbodies in the revenue records, for industrial purposes, a few decades ago, but now attempting to retrieve the properties for re-creating the water sources.
First Division Bench of Chief Justice Amreshwar Pratap Sahi and Justice Subramonium Prasad has requested Advocate General Vijay Narayan to assist the court in deciding the significant issue that arose during the hearing of a writ appeal preferred by a small-scale industrial unit, operating from a government industrial estate in Ambattur.
The appeal was preferred against a judgment passed by Justice M. Dhandapani on August 30, permitting Tamil Nadu Small Industries Development Corporation (SIDCO) to retrieve two plots at the industrial estate after returning the sale consideration, along with interest at the rate of 18% per annum, since 1993, and restore them into waterbodies.
A private firm named Tamil Nadu Electricals had preferred the appeal stating that it was allotted 17,504 sq ft of land at the industrial estate in 1993, on payment of ₹4.82 lakh, for establishing its unit that manufactures power and distribution transformers. The company used the land as a yard to store empty transformer tanks and other industrial materials.
Allotment cancelled
Suddenly, in 2008, SIDCO cancelled the allotment of the plot on the ground that it was actually a pond. A similar cancellation order was passed with respect to another industrial unit and hence they filed two individual writ petitions in the High Court, challenging the cancellation orders passed after 15 years of allotment.
Dismissing the writ petitions, pending since 2008, by way of a common order on August 30 last year, the single judge ordered return of the sale consideration, along with interest.
Assailing the order, the appellant’s counsel argued that the lands were allotted for industrial purposes, only because they had lost their original character of being waterbodies.
The counsel contended that it was impermissible under law to retrieve lands that had been sold 15 years ago, just because they were vacant. He said that SIDCO had cancelled the allotment when the appellant had obtained plan approval.
Senior standing counsel for SIDCO M.J. Jaseem Mohamed argued that lands classified as ‘Kulam poromboke’ in the revenue records were inadvertently reclassified as industrial plots and allotted to private units in 1993. He said that such a mistake had to be rectified in the wake of the Tamil Nadu Protection of Tanks and Eviction of Encroachment Act, 2007.
The Bench directed the Industries Secretary and SIDCO to file their counter affidavits and urged the Advocate General to conduct the case for the State.
