The Project Director, Project Implementation Unit v. P.V. Krishnamoorthy & Ors.
Background
Under the Union Government's "Bharatmala Pariyojna" highway development program, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) decided to build a new 8-lane national highway connecting Chennai, Krishnagiri, and Salem in Tamil Nadu, changing the originally planned Chennai-Madurai "Economic Corridor" route to this new "National Corridor" route instead. Notifications were issued declaring the stretch a national highway and proposing to acquire the land needed for it. Affected landowners and public-interest litigants challenged these notifications before the Madras High Court on numerous grounds, including that a "National Highway" can only be declared over an already-existing road rather than a brand-new alignment, that environmental and forest clearances should have come first, that the project lacked genuine need, and that the consultant originally hired for the Chennai-Madurai route was improperly continued for the new route without fresh selection. The High Court struck down the notifications as illegal, and the authorities appealed to the Supreme Court (with the landowners cross-appealing on a related issue).
Decision Breakdown
The Supreme Court largely sided with the government authorities, holding that a "National Highway" can be declared even over a largely new alignment and is not restricted to an existing road, and that the decision to switch from the Chennai-Madurai route to the Chennai-Krishnagiri-Salem route was a reasoned policy decision by a competent committee, not an arbitrary or "colourable" exercise of power that courts should second-guess. On the technical legal question of whether the land acquisition notifications had "lapsed" under Section 3D(3) of the National Highways Act (which requires the acquisition to be completed within a set time), the Court invoked its constitutional power under Article 142 to hold that the time taken in obtaining environmental and forest clearances should be excluded from that clock, since the process was effectively "stayed" while those approvals were pending: otherwise, legitimate infrastructure projects could be defeated purely by procedural delay in getting unrelated clearances. The Court also left open the landowners' right to separately challenge the correctness of any environmental/forest clearances before the appropriate forum, since those were not actually examined in this case. As a result, the government's appeals were mostly allowed (the challenge to the notifications failed), while the lone landowner appeal was dismissed; one part of the High Court's order, restoring land-revenue "mutation" entries since the land hadn't actually been taken over yet, was left undisturbed.
Lesson Learnt
When the government changes or finalizes the route of a major public infrastructure project after careful study and committee deliberation, courts will not strike down that decision merely because an earlier plan existed or because objectors disagree with the choice: judicial review of such policy decisions is narrow and focuses on whether there was an actual abuse of power, not on re-examining the wisdom of the decision itself; and the clock for completing land acquisition proceedings does not run against the government for time genuinely spent securing environmental and forest law clearances.