S.N. Bhardwaj v. Archaeological Survey of India
Background
The appellant filed a public-interest writ petition alleging that the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was failing to stop rampant illegal construction and encroachment inside the protected Tughlakabad Fort in Delhi. The Delhi High Court disposed of the petition early on by simply asking the ASI to "look into" the grievance, prompting the appellant to appeal to the Supreme Court. Over more than a decade, the Supreme Court itself took over supervision of the matter, vacating a stay that had let encroachment continue, repeatedly ordering no further construction, and directing the ASI to survey and report on encroachers, but the ASI repeatedly failed to comply, even after a cost was imposed on it and a contempt petition was filed (and later dropped).
Decision Breakdown
The Court recorded that it had already, through its own series of orders over the years, firmly established that protecting Tughlakabad Fort is imperative, that the earlier stay permitting encroachment was wrong and had been vacated, and that no further construction should occur. Since the ASI's continuing non-compliance was now simply a matter of monitoring and enforcement rather than deciding any fresh legal question, the Court held that this day-to-day monitoring could be more practically handled by the Delhi High Court, from where the case had originated. It therefore transferred the case back to the High Court for continued monitoring of compliance, while formally disposing of the civil appeal and the transfer case before itself.
Lesson Learnt
Courts sometimes handle slow-moving enforcement failures by repeated monitoring orders over the years (a "continuing mandamus"), and once the core legal questions are settled, routine supervision can be handed back to a lower court: citizens shouldn't assume a case is being dropped just because the Supreme Court transfers ongoing monitoring elsewhere.