Segur plateau elephant corridor: Madras High Court refuses interim protection for resort owners

Madras High Court denies interim protection to resort owners facing demolition, advises seeking clarification from Supreme Court.

The Madras High Court on Monday refused to provide any kind of interim protection to private resort owners who are facing threat of demolition pursuant to orders passed against them by the Supreme Court constituted Segur Plateau Elephant Corridor Inquiry Committee (SPECIC), headed by retired High Court judge K. Venkataraman, on August 21, 2023.

A special Division Bench of Justices N. Sathish Kumar and D. Bharatha Chakravarthy decided to hear all their writ petitions on October 28 but refused to extend till then an interim order already passed by another Division Bench which had recorded an Additional Advocate General’s undertaking that the demolition notices shall be kept in abeyance for a limited period.

Observing that he does not have the practice of recording oral undertakings given by law officers and pointing out that the State was not represented by any of them on Monday, Justice Kumar said, the State and the resort owners must seek a clarification from the Supreme Court as to whether the High Court could entertain the writ petitions filed against the SPECIC’s orders.

He told senior counsel Salman Khurshid and Jayna Kothari, representing the resort owners, that the previous Division Bench had adjourned the batch of cases on more than one occassion only for the purpose of obtaining such a clarification and hence, it would be inappropriate for his Bench to pass any kind of interim orders against the decisions of the SPECIC constituted by the top court.

In their affidavits, the writ petitioners had contended that the SPECIC, constituted by the Supreme Court in 2020, had a very limited scope of deciding only the alleged arbitrary variance in the acreage of the Segur plateau elephant corridor but it had expanded its scope and gone about deciding the title of the resort owners over their properties located on the notified corridor.

They claimed that the SPECIC had no authority whatsoever to conclude that it was mandatory to obtain the approval of a district level committee, constituted under the Tamil Nadu Preservation of Private Forests Act (TNPPFA) of 1949, for purchase of lands in the region after 1991 and that the purchases made without such approval should be considered as null and void.