It is a story of grit and determination, a tale of how a family fought a legal battle for 47 years to retrieve a small portion of a huge tract of prime city land acquired by the government and given away not just to State instrumentalities but also to private educational institutions. In the process, three members of the family died leaving behind a spinster, who had to face the legal proceedings all alone and achieved partial success recently.
Landlord Shanmugasundaram (since dead) was owning roughly 64 grounds close to Taylors Road in Kilpauk, Chennai, in 1982 when the government invoked the Tamil Nadu Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act of 1976 (since repealed) and acquired more than 10,000 square metres.
A major portion of the acquired land was given to Chinmaya Vidyalaya. The rest was allotted to Tamil Nadu Housing Board (TNHB) and other institutions.
The landlord was allowed to retain only 6.5 grounds after the acquisition, which became a subject matter of dispute before the Tamil Nadu Land Reforms Special Appellate Tribunal.
In 1989, the 6.5 grounds too were taken away by the government after invoking the Land Acquisition Act of 1894 claiming that the properties were required for an integrated housing scheme to be implemented by TNHB.
Plea for reconveyance
When all this was happening, Shanmugasundaram turned a pauper and died on December 19, 1990 leaving behind his wife, son and daughter. Subsequently, Gowri Shanmugasundaram, wife of the deceased, applied for deleting their lands from the acquisition proceedings. When the plea was rejected, she filed a writ petition in the Madras High Court and obtained an order in November 2001 to consider her plea for reconveyance.
Multiple cases
While doing so, the High Court held that it was unfair on the part of the government to deny reconveyance despite a Special Tahsildar having given a report that the family was living in penury and it was “cruel” to deprive them of even the small extent of land they were left with after the acquisition of a much larger extent in 1982. But the property was not returned, forcing the aged woman and her two unmarried children to file multiple cases.
Even as the legal proceedings were on, Gowri’s son S. Senthil Nathan died on June 30, 2013 and she breathed her last on January 26, 2015.
This left the spinster S. Sengamalam to continue the legal battle with the sole support of her lawyer V. Ramesh. Moved by the plight of the woman, the High Court on October 14, 2015 quashed TNHB’s 2011 order refusing to reconvey the property and directed the government to consider its release.
The order was passed by the then Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul (now a Supreme Court judge) and Justice T.S. Sivagnanam. Nevertheless, the government did not relent forcing the spinster to file a contempt of court petition.
Disposing of the contempt petition on July 16 this year, a Division Bench of Justices Sivagnanam and V. Bhavani Subbaroyan came down heavily on former Housing Secretary S. Krishnan and decided to punish him.
Nevertheless, before doing so, they granted time for the incumbent Housing Secretary Rajesh Lakhoni to remedy the breach and he came up with a Government Order passed on August 19 agreeing to reconvey four grounds and 225 square feet land, since the rest of two grounds and 1,525 square feet had been classified as pathway. When the GO was produced in the court, Mr. Ramesh objected to the partial reconveyance of the land.
However, the judges said that issue shall be considered later and directed the government to first handover possession of a little over four grounds to the petitioner within a week and make necessary mutations in the revenue records.
