Earning livelihood not at the cost of people’s lives: HC

New Delhi, Nov 20  Earning of livelihood cannot be at the cost of people’s lives, the Delhi High Court said today as it came down heavily on people using residential premises to carry out commercial activities.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar made the observation while expressing concern over large number of coaching institutes coming up in residential areas here including the Delhi University campus, causing parking woes and other inconvenience to the local residents.

“It is a very impossible situation. The people living in the city have become selfish for earning profit out of their business. They don’t even think about their neighbours.

“However, somebody’s livelihood is not over somebody’s life, and running a coaching centre is certainly not. This is only right to business and not education,” the bench observed.

While asking the owners to resolve the problem of chaos, the bench said the commercial activities being carried on was illegal and it should go.

“Shift the commercial activities to other place. Let the city live and its people breathe. Delhi was never like this before,” it said, adding that the students will also move out if you decide to shift.

The court’s observation came during the hearing of pleas by Delhi residents Sanjay Singhal and Kanchan Gupta, who have alleged that over 100 coaching centres were permitted to be run by the MCD in residential properties.

They have also said that these centres were allowed to come up without conforming to the requirements of the master plan for buildings.

Contending that this was completely illegal and ought not to have been permitted, they alleged that it was resulting in overcrowding of these areas and causing “grave nuisance to the bonafide residents.”

“The main roads in front of the building being converted into parking space for the students and the employees of the coaching centres, creating bottleneck for the traffic, apart from the nuisance due to noise and lack of water and electricity,” the petitioners have claimed.

The court had earlier observed that the national capital “will breathe” easier if it stayed all such conversion of residential properties for commercial use without adhering to the master plan requirements.

The court listed the matter for December 14 by when it has asked the coaching institutes to chalk out plans.

It also said that any action, including admission of students in the coaching institutes, will be subject to the final outcome of the petitions pending before it.

The court is also hearing several students’ applications in the matter to reconsider its decision to shut down the coaching centres running in residential properties.

The students, studying at numerous coaching centres in Outram Lines, Kingsway Camp and Mukherjee Nagar, pointed out that any decision in this regard would lead to consequences in their careers.