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Punjab, UT Admn caught in New Chandigarh tangle
Saurabh Malik
Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, May 19
The Punjab Government and the Chandigarh Administration are at loggerheads over access to Mullanpur. The UT Administration today alleged before the Punjab and Haryana High Court that its neighbour was not cooperating with it in the development of a regional plan for Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh; and one of the objections was that there were not enough “doors on the Mullanpur side”.

Taking a serious view of the lack of coordination, a Division Bench made it clear that the construction on the periphery would be brought to a standstill, in the absence of cooperation.

Mullanpur, also known as New Chandigarh, is in the spotlight

The Division Bench of Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice Arun Palli said the states were more interested in commercial exploitation of the periphery than the larger issue of preserving Chandigarh’s heritage.

The court also directed for intervention by the Secretary, Union Ministry of Urban Development.

The Bench expressed displeasure over the Chandigarh Administration’s failure to place a report on the draft master plan before the UT Administrator within the time specified by it. The Bench also recorded the undertaking of the UT Chief Architect that the report would be placed before the Administrator in the next 10 days.

The Punjab Government has already initiated a move to rechristen Mullanpur as New Chandigarh. The move is expected to benefit the state’s own elite, who own properties there. No less than 60 “influential persons”, including Punjab’s Deputy Chief Minister Sukhbir Singh Badal and State Director-General of Police Sumedh Singh Saini, have properties on Chandigarh’s periphery.

As the case hovering around coordinated development of the periphery and the preparation of Chandigarh’s master plan came up for resumed hearing, amicus curiae (friend of the court)-cum-senior advocate Manmohan Lal Sarin and counsel for the petitioner Shailendra Jain said only a stay on construction on the periphery could compel coordination. Sarin said construction coming up practically everywhere was overburdening the system in Chandigarh.

The insistence on stay followed assertion by UT Senior Standing Counsel Sanjeev Sharma that the regional plan had hit a roadblock as the apparent attitude of the neighbouring states was that “we don’t care for Chandigarh”. Taking note of Sarin’s suggestion, the Bench called for intervention by the Secretary, Union Ministry of Urban Development, and asked counsel for the Union of India Onkar Singh Batalvi to do the needful. The case will now come up for hearing in July.