Bullet train project is of national importance, rules HC

The Bombay High Court rejected a challenge by Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Co Ltd, Mumbai's largest private landlord, to the £26.4 million state acquisition of its 10-acre Vikhroli plot and the constitutional validity of a legal provision, allowing the Mumbai-Ahmedabad bullet train project to move forward. The HC said when 97% of the land is already acquired, “interfering at this stage would be totally against public interest in an infrastructural and public project of national importance”.
A day before Prime Minister Narendra Modi is supposed to go to Mumbai for the Vande Bharat launch, the judgment is rendered. The site was turned over to the National High Speed Rail Corporation, which is carrying out the bullet train project.
“Merely because there are certain alleged irregularities in the procedure required to be followed while acquiring land”, the HC bench of Justices R D Dhanuka and MM Sathaye said it cannot exercise its discretionary power. The bench added, “In case of conflict on inter-fundamental rights and intra-fundamental rights, the court has to examine as to where lies the larger public interest, while balancing the two conflicting rights. It is the paramount collective interest which would ultimately prevail. In the facts of this case, the private interest claimed by the petitioner does not prevail over the public interest which would sub serve an infrastructural project of public importance, which is a dream project of this country and a first of its kind.”
The HC declined a plea made by senior counsel Navroz Seervai, appearing for Godrej & Boyce, to stay its judgment even by two weeks.