Days after Uttarakhand high court recognised river Ganga as a living identity, the river gets its first legal notice. For the first time, the Uttarakhand High Court has issued a notice to the river which is considered holy by Hindus. As per the notice, now all the respondents including Ganga will have to file the replies in the next hearing.
In a report published in Hindustan Times, a bench comprising of justices VK Bhist and Alok Singh, apart from Ganga, has also issued notice to the Uttarakhand government, Rishikesh Nagar Palika, Central Pollution Control Board and state pollution control asking them to reply by May 8 on a PIL challenging the government proposal to make garbage dump in Rishikesh.
The village head (gram pradhan) of Khadak Maf village, Swarup Singh Pundir with the help of his lawyer Gopal K Verma filed the PIL challenging the government’s move to make the garbage dump spread over 10-acre land and river flowing on both the sides of it.
According to petitioner, construction of garbage dump will pollute the river even more and will become a problem in government’s Namami Gange project which is focusing on cleaning of the river and for which government is spending crores of rupees.
On March 20, the Uttarakhand High Court had declared Ganga and Yamuna “juristic/legal persons/living entities having the status of a legal person”. On the order of the court, a lawyer at National Green Tribunal (NGT) Raj Panjwani said, “This order may come across as strange but it is not any different from the status of being a legal entity as in the case of family trusts or a company”.
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