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Civil Property & InheritanceSupreme Court of India

Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation v. Ahmedabad Green Belt Khedut Mandal

Civil Appeal · Neutral citation not assigned (Civil Appeal Nos. 1542-44 of 2001)Decided 9 May 2014
Civil Appeal Nos. 1542-44 of 2001
Justice B.S. Chauhan · Justice J. Chelameswar · Justice M.Y. Eqbal

Background

Landowners challenged Gujarat's town-planning provisions that earmarked parts of a scheme for roads, amenities and sale to fund infrastructure. They argued that earlier development-plan reservations had expired and that the authorities were indirectly taking land with inadequate compensation. The High Court upheld the law but excluded certain previously reserved lands from its operation.

Decision Breakdown

The Court allowed the authorities' appeals and overturned that exclusion. It explained that a development plan and a town-planning scheme are distinct, so expiry of a reservation under the former does not prevent lawful reservations under the latter. Pooling and reconstituting plots must be considered with the scheme's compensation and benefits, rather than treated simply as ordinary compulsory acquisition. The permitted sale percentage referred to the scheme's total area, not every individual plot. The separate challenges to draft schemes were rejected as premature, with owners able to raise objections, obtain a hearing and challenge the eventual order.

Lesson Learnt

Expiry of one planning reservation does not free land from every later statutory planning scheme. Owners should examine the reconstituted plot, compensation and objection process before assuming that any deduction is automatically unlawful.

Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation v. Ahmedabad Green Belt Khedut Mandal – Legal Case Shots | LegalAware