The Telangana High Court on Friday was highly critical of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC), the civic body of Hyderabad, for its inefficiency in preventing illegal constructions along ponds and lakes in the city. Pulling up the civic body, the High Court said that the GHMC’s Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioners should be sacked for allowing illegal constructions to flourish.
The court has summoned GHMC Commissioner and Municipal Administration and Urban Development Principal Secretary to appear in court on April 24.
While hearing petitions on illegal constructions, the bench comprising Chief Justice Raghvendra Singh Chauhan and Justice A Abhishek Reddy came down heavily on the GHMC and asked them to explain what were the steps undertaken to prevent unauthorised constructions.
Fuming over the huge number of petitions that were piling in the court against illegal constructions, encroachment of lakes, ponds and government land, the bench directed the state counsel to furnish a list of all such pending pleas in the court.
“It seems there is no wing in GHMC to work on this menace of illegal constructions. If that was the performance of GHMC, first get rid of its chief, suspend all your Deputy Commissioners and initiate departmental inquiries against them,” the bench said, according to The Hindu.
The bench further directed the High Court registry to tag them all together for taking up all these causes. “If GHMC continues to fail, then we will start getting things done through continuous monitoring of the issue,” The Times of India quoted the bench as saying.
The bench viewed that the state’s policy regularising illegal structures and its methods in issuing such Government Orders once every five years has enabled encroachers to construct illegal structures.
If the GHMC continues its lethargy, the beautiful city of Hyderabad would be converted into nightmare cities like Mumbai and Patna, the bench pointed out.