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M/s. Goel Ganga Developers India Pvt. Ltd. v. Union of India (I.A. No. 64665 of 2019 in Civil Appeal No. 10854 of 2016)

Civil Appeal · 2019 INSC 1018Decided 11 Sept 2019
Civil Appeal No. 10854 of 2016
Justice Deepak Gupta · Justice Aniruddha Bose

Background

Goel Ganga Developers' Civil Appeal No. 10854 of 2016 against the Union of India/Ministry of Environment and Forests had already been finally decided by judgment dated 10.08.2018, which held that under Item 8 of the EIA Notification dated 14.09.2006, all covered construction not open to the sky must be treated as "built up area" for environmental-clearance purposes, regardless of municipal Floor Space Index (FSI) exemptions. After that final judgment, the company filed an application (I.A. No. 64665 of 2019) asking the same bench to reconsider its 2018 ruling, arguing it conflicted with an earlier three-judge bench decision in the "NOIDA Park case" ((2011) 1 SCC 744), which had flagged ambiguity in the same notification.

Decision Breakdown

The Court (the same two judges who authored the 2018 judgment) examined the NOIDA Park case closely and found the dispute there was entirely different: it concerned whether the project was a "building/construction project" or a "township/area development project," and separately whether open-to-sky activity areas should be counted as built-up area. In that earlier case all parties had agreed that covered construction was built-up area, so the question decided in the 2018 Goel Ganga judgment (that covered construction is always built-up area) never actually arose or was contested in the NOIDA Park case. Since the earlier precedent did not address the point in dispute, it created no binding conflict, and the Court found no error warranting reconsideration. The application was accordingly dismissed as devoid of merit, leaving the 2018 judgment undisturbed.

Lesson Learnt

A party cannot get a final Supreme Court judgment reopened simply by citing an earlier ruling that touches the same statute in passing: reconsideration will only succeed if the earlier case actually decided the same point; courts will not treat a prior judgment as binding precedent on an issue it never had to resolve.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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