The Uttarakhand High Court on Wednesday directed the state government to file a response to an urgent application citing a serious threat to the fragile environment in the foothills between Dehradun and Mussoorie due to uncontrolled illegal constructions.
Renu Paul, a resident of Dehradun and former faculty member of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, filed the application in a 2021 Public Interest Litigation (PIL).
Advocate Abhijay Negi, who represented Paul before the bench of Chief Justice Manoj Kumar Gupta and Justice Subhash Upadhyay, described the stretch where the plains of Dehradun meet the high hills of Mussoorie as a critical ecological and protected area.
Negi said rampant construction activity continues in the area despite regulations against it. He added that the state government amended the building laws in 2015 to introduce Section 4.4 to regulate construction in fragile hill belts, but its implementation on the ground remains “almost non-existent”.
He said the petitioner presented recent evidence before the court to prove that construction activity had intensified during the period when the PIL remained in abeyance.
The defendants filed their responses and a rejoinder was also filed, but the matter has not been listed for nearly two years, Negi said. “The urgent request shows how the situation has gone from bad to worse in the foothills region during this period,” he said.
The Supreme Court took notice of the applications and directed the state government to file its response to the urgent application within three weeks.
The petition said that the state government has notified nine areas within these hills as environmentally sensitive through a government order dated February 5, 2019. It added that the hill area acts as an important ecological buffer zone and carbon store for the Doon Valley. The petition said the area has increasingly become a hotspot for unauthorized construction due to a lack of enforcement.
The original PIL cited amendments to the Uttarakhand Building Construction and Development Regulations, 2011, and said it prohibited construction in areas where the severity of landslides is high or where the natural slope exceeds 30 degrees. She added that unsupervised construction work continued in the environmentally sensitive area despite these restrictions.
