Telangana High Court disposes of all appeals, permits steel bridge work at Punjagutta

Hyderabad: Disposing off a tag of four appeals, the division bench comprising Chief Justice Raghavendra Singh Chauhan and Justice A Abhishek Reddy permitted the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation to go ahead with the construction work of Steel Bridge at Punjagutta near the graveyard.

The CJ Bench on Thursday disposed off all the four appeals by the GHMC against the single Judge Orders. Few private companies namely, Aditya Arts, Janahita Publications Pvt Ltd.,

In & Out Marketing approached the High Court by filing individual writ petitions seeking a stay on the notices issued by the GHMC, directing them to remove the huge advertisement hoarding structures erected by them over the graveyard, as they have become a hindrance for the GHMC in taking up alignment work of construction of a steel bridge.

Hearing the pleas the CJ bench opined that due to the fact that the necessity of widening of the road cannot be questioned since public interest will override the interest of an individual.

Moreover, as agreed before the court, the owners of the hoardings are directed to file representation to the GHMC Commissioner to shift their advertisement hoardings to an alternate place.

Chief Justice Raghavendra Singh Chauhan directed the GHMC Commissioner to engage labour to dismantle the hoardings safely without damaging them and placing it in a safe place.

The dismantling process should be done in the presence of the owners of the hoardings and kept under the custody of GHMC. The GHMC Commissioner will decide the representation of the petitioners to shift the hoardings to an alternate place within seven days of receipt of the representation.

Advocate General BS Prasad informed the Bench that the time is advantageous for GHMC to complete the work as traffic is out of the roads due to lockdown.

If the lockdown is lifted traffic will create hurdles for GHMC in completing the work. Seeing that a bottleneck is created at a particular place, it is essential that the road is widened so as to ease the traffic, AG said.