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Criticising the police for arresting an SUV driver and blaming him for the incident, the high court said, “Mercifully, you have not challaned the rainwater for entering into the basement.”
“You would have said how dare the water enter the basement. You could have fined the water also, the way you arrested the SUV driver for driving his car there,” it said.
A bench of Acting Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela asked the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) to nominate a senior officer to oversee the probe by the CBI into the criminal case in a time-bound manner.
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It formed a committee headed by the chief secretary of Delhi and also comprising DDA vice chairman, Delhi Police commissioner and MCD commissioner to deal with the issue and submit the report within eight weeks.
“Having regard to the nature of the incident and to ensure that the public has no doubt with regards to investigation, this court transfers the probe to the CBI,” the high court said.
It castigated the police and Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) over the drowning incident, saying it was unable to fathom how the students could not come out and sought to know whether the doors were blocked or staircases narrow.
“What’s your line of looking? how did the children drown? You have done an investigation now. We are on August 2. Why were they not able to come out of the basement? It doesn’t get flooded immediately. Water takes at least two-three minutes to fill a basement, it can’t happen in a minute. Why were they not able to come out?”
The bench said administratively Delhi has a multiplicity of authorities who are only passing the buck and doing nothing. The public perception is that civic authorities are inefficient, it said.
The high court told the Delhi government counsel that if the administrators are carrying on with a freebie culture, they would not know how to change the structure.
“One change in GST and the revenue will go up. You will have to think out of the box. If you do not find revenue in a place like Delhi, you would not find it anywhere else,” it said.
It said Delhi’s physical infrastructure is nearly 75-year-old and they are not only inadequate but poorly maintained.
On being informed by the MCD commissioner, who was present in the court, that the stormwater drains in the area were dysfunctional, the bench asked why the officials did not inform the MCD chief about it earlier.
The bench also ordered the removal of encroachments and unauthorised constructions, including on stormwater and sewage drains, in the Rajinder Nagar area.
The court said that with the rise in Delhi’s population, the city needs a robust system. Due to various subsidy schemes, migration in the national capital is also increasing, it said.
“The financial health of civic agencies like MCD, if not precarious, is not healthy. This court would not be wrong in concluding that civic agencies in Delhi have no funds to carry out major infrastructure,” the high court said.
During the hearing, the counsel for Delhi Police submitted that the probe into the case was carried out under extreme stress and that it was doing its best to have forensic examinations of every aspect to ascertain the culpability.
To this, the court remarked that “we are all under a lot of stress” but in the present scenario, “we can’t come under stress”.
“The moment we come under stress, we take the wrong steps. And in this case, some wrong steps have been taken. Please do an investigation in a scientific manner. Don’t come under any stress,” the court said.
It wondered how a passerby could be arrested and not the official who did not see that the stormwater drain was dysfunctional and pulled up the police for not questioning any MCD official or even seizing the recent file from the civic body, which could have been an important piece of evidence.
It rapped the MCD for not adhering to judicial orders and said its officials were not bothered and there is no respect for the law. The court asked if human lives don’t count for officials and added that there has to be some accountability.
It is no wonder that Delhi is passing from one crisis to another. One day there is the problem of draught, the other day it is flood, the bench said, adding if the water is properly stored during monsoon there would not be a draught the next year.
The court directed the MCD to ensure that drains in the area are functional and if their capacity has to be increased, it be done in a systematic manner at the earliest.
Regarding the Delhi Fire Services’ clearance to Rau’s IAS Study Circle, where the drowning incident took place, indicating that the basement was being used for storage, the court asked how the place was changed to a study hall in just a few days.
The court was hearing a plea by an organization Kutumb seeking a high-level committee to investigate the deaths of three civil service aspirants in the basement of a flooded coaching centre in Old Rajinder Nagar on the evening of July 27.
The three who died were Shreya Yadav (25) of Uttar Pradesh, Tanya Soni (25) from Telangana and Nevin Delvin (24) from Kerala.