Dismissing a petition which stalled the process of allotting house site patta to 18 people who had lost their dwellings during land acquisition for widening and formation of Oddanchatram – Tirupur state highway project, Madras high court imposed a cost of Rs 25,000 on a petitioner for filing a vexatious petition.
Petitioner R Chinnasamy sought to forbear the authorities from granting patta to people on a land which he claimed to be a water channel at Thangachiammpatti village in Dindigul district.
A division bench of Justices P N Prakash and B Pugalendhi said the records show that the land was classified only as a road poromboke land and not water course. The authorities had taken a specific stand in their counter-affidavit that after a village road was formed in 1964, a few villagers had encroached upon the poromboke land.
The petitioner who owns an adjacent land had also encroached upon the poromboke land and was cultivating maize, which he had not denied. Hence, the court observed that the petitioner had approached it with false claims in order to encroach the poromboke land adjacent to his land.
The petitioner had stalled the benefits to 18 people for whom the government intended to allot poromboke land as resettlement. The vexatious litigation had also stalled the state highway project to an extent. Hence the judges dismissed the petition and directed him to pay a cost of Rs 25,000 to the CM’s Relief Fund in eight weeks.