Okhla Enclave Plot Holders Welfare Association v. Union of India
Background
Nearly three decades ago, plot allottees of a Faridabad housing colony ("Okhla Enclave") developed by a private builder filed a writ petition after the builder failed to honour the terms of its allotment scheme covering EWS, No-Profit-No-Loss, and open-market plot categories. In 2016, the Supreme Court appointed a retired judge as a one-member Special Committee to scrutinise thousands of competing claims and identify genuinely eligible allottees, assisted by a Scrutiny Committee under Haryana's Town and Country Planning department. This 2025 order dealt with a large batch of pending applications: some seeking inclusion in the eligible list, some disputing the Special Committee's findings, and some raising fresh implementation issues from the State of Haryana and the original developer.
Decision Breakdown
The Court, assisted by an amicus curiae, sorted the various pending applications between those requiring its own decision and those to be referred back to the Special Committee for further scrutiny. It rejected review-type claims seeking to reopen already-decided inclusions/exclusions from the final list, and rejected claims from applicants trying to bypass the rule against multiple family claims in the No-Profit-No-Loss category. On larger implementation issues, it directed Haryana to finalize a fresh layout plan within 10 weeks, adhere to the agreed 65% land share for plotted development, remove encroachments, begin scrutiny of commercial-category claimants, and directed the original colonizer/developer to pay outstanding amounts due under the Court's 2019 judgment within six weeks, while asking the Special Committee to continue scrutinising the remaining unresolved claims.
Lesson Learnt
In mass, decades-long litigation involving thousands of claimants, courts often delegate fact-finding to a court-appointed committee and confine themselves to supervising compliance and resolving disputes about the committee's process: an ordinary litigant's individual grievance in such a case is usually addressed by that committee, not by re-arguing it before the Supreme Court itself.