Water men Rajinder Singh and Manoj Misra of the Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan have filed a curative petition in the Supreme Court asking for a review of the 2009 Supreme Court judgment on the Yamuna river.
The Supreme Court had overturned an earlier high court judgment which had asked for an expert committee, led by Dr R.K. Pachauri, to look into the whole issue of a series of constructions on the Yamuna river bed.
The stand taken by these two petitioners is that a series of subsequent events during the last two years, including the 2010 heavy floods which saw the river waters enter the basement of the Commonwealth Games Village (CGV), have only served to reinforce their earlier plaint that the CGV and the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation metro depot have indeed been constructed on the flood plain of the Yamuna river.
Their petition quotes extensively from the Shunglu report, chaired by Mr V.K. Shunglu, former comptroller and auditor-general of India, which highlighted that, “the selection of site for the games village in 2003 was a priori and no exercise was undertaken to compare the selected site with alternate sites available with DDA. The high-level committee was informed of the possibility of constructing the village in close proximity to Jawaharlal Nehru Sports Complex on land belonging to L&DO also remained unexplored,” the petition stated. The Shunglus report highlights that no alternative sites were considered because of an implicit desire to construct next to Akshardham and at no other site.