New Delhi: The Supreme Court threatens action on illegal occupation of government accommodation across the country, the Supreme Court on Thursday threatened to issue notice to Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee on the 30-odd former parliamentarians who were overstaying in such houses in Delhi.
The Court also pulled up three state governments for not doing enough to evict bureaucrats and politicians who were illegally occupying government accommodation.
"If you can't take action, we will issue notice to the speaker," a bench of Justice B N Agarwal and P P Naolekar told government counsel Wasim Ahemad Quadri while dealing with the issue of 30-odd former parliamentarians overstaying in government accommodation and the recovery of penal rent from them.
"Central government officials and politicians are not on a different footing from those of state governments," said the bench, which had minutes earlier rapped Andhra Pradesh for its inaction in evicting 60-odd government employees who were overstaying in their official accommodation.
The bench's threat to issue notice to Chatterjee came after it found a government affidavit on the issue "vague" and bereft of details like the action that was being taken to get the houses vacated and to recover penal rent from the occupants.
The bench was especially upset when it noticed that 30 former parliamentarians were illegally occupying government houses in Delhi.
When the bench asked Quadri about the action being taken against the offenders, Quadri sought to shift the focus from the government by saying the houses had been shifted from the central pool to the parliamentary pool.
At this, the bench asked him to approach the relevant committee of parliament for taking remedial measures and threatened to issue notice to the speaker if this did not yield the desired results.
Minutes earlier, while dealing with the issue of unauthorised occupation of government bungalows in Hyderabad and Patna, the bench had ordered the Andhra Pradesh and Bihar governments to immediately suspend 60 and 56 government officers respectively who were overstaying in government bungalows in the two cities.
"Put them behind bars. Let them be IAS (Indian Administrative Service) officers. They may be senior IAS officers, judicial officers or MLAs but they do not have immunity from the law. They all are equal," the bench remarked while dealing with the case of unauthorised occupancies in Hyderabad.
While dealing with a similar issue in Madhya Pradesh, the bench termed as "peanuts" the recovery of Rs 3,00,000 against arrears of Rs 50 million. It also asked the state government to file an affidavit detailing what it was doing to recover penal rent from the unauthorised occupants.
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