Will raze even a Taj Mahal if built on waterbody: Madras high court – Times of India

CHENNAI: “Even if you build a Taj Mahal on a waterbody, we will tear it down,” said Madras high court, censuring Southern Railway for constructing a subway on a water body.
“In several matters, the allegations levelled are that railway authorities and National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) in particular, tend to show little respect to waterbodies standing in the way of their putting up new construction to facilitate highways and railway operations,” the court said on Wednesday.
The first bench of Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee and Justice Senthilkumar Ramamoorthy made the observation on a public interest writ petition filed by S T Arumugam against construction of a subway in Nagapattinam.
Counsel for the petitioner V Karthikeyan alleged that one or more waterbodies may have been completely destroyed in undertaking the construction.
Representing the railway, advocate P T Ramkumar submitted that the construction was almost complete and the subway was ready for use. Refusing to accept the same, the court directed both the railway authorities and the state to file their counter-affidavits within three weeks.
“The state will indicate the nature of the land which has been constructed upon and also the feasibility of the construction being taken down, if necessary, to resurrect the waterbody, if there was one,” the court said. While it is important that highways must be built and deeper access by using the railways is also welcome, the authorities ought to avoid making any construction on any waterbody and if it is completely unavoidable, pillars or the like may be constructed so that the larger part of the waterbody is left undisturbed and nature thereof not irreversibly altered, the bench added.
There have been other reports of police stations in some places being constructed on what used to be waterbodies. The consistent refrain of this court has been that waterbodies ought to be preserved to allow humans and other life forms to survive and a zero-tolerance policy has to be adopted when it comes to disturbing or desecrating any waterbody any further, the court said.
It added, many major waterbodies all over the state and particularly in the urban areas have altogether disappeared. Even the reason for the devastating flood in 2015 was reported to be as a result of the flowing channels being impeded by arbitrary construction in this city.