India court criticises 'shifting stand' on gay sex

The 148-year-old colonial law was overturned in 2009

India's Supreme Court has criticised the government for its shifting stand on the issue of decriminalising homosexuality.

The health ministry says it supports a 2009 Delhi High Court order decriminalising gay sex.
But last week, senior government lawyer PP Malhotra told the Supreme Court that homosexuality was immoral.
Within hours, the home ministry disowned the lawyer's statement and said he had read from the wrong file.
The Delhi High Court ruling in 2009 overturned a 148-year-old colonial law which described a same-sex relationship as an "unnatural offence".
The Supreme Court is hearing challenges from groups opposing the new law.
"Don't make a mockery of the system and don't waste the court's time," the Supreme Court judges told the government on Tuesday.
Earlier, the health ministry told the court that there was "no error in decriminalising gay sex".
Last week, Additional Solicitor General PP Malhotra raised eyebrows with his statement in court: "Gay sex is highly immoral and against social order and there is high chance of spreading of diseases through such acts."
He said that India could not imitate Western practices.
But it turned out he had been reading an old statement delivered before the 2009 judgment. The home ministry said there had been a "miscommunication".
The 2009 ruling was welcomed by India's gay community, which said the judgement would help protect them from harassment and persecution.
But political, social and religious groups want the colonial-era law reinstated.
'What is unnatural sex?' Many people in India still regard same-sex relationships as illegitimate, but rights groups have long argued that the law contravened human rights.
Section 377 of the colonial Indian Penal Code defined homosexual acts as "carnal intercourse against the order of nature" and made them illegal.
But the Delhi High Court said the colonial-era law was discriminatory and gay sex between consenting adults should not be treated as a crime. Until the high court ruling, homosexual acts were punishable by a 10-year prison term.
Earlier this month the Supreme Court began a debate on the legality of decriminalising gay sex in private between consenting adults.
The court asked groups challenging the judgement to define "unnatural sex".
"So who is the expert to say what is 'unnatural sex'? The meaning of the word has never been constant," Justices GS Singhvi and SJ Mukhopadhyaya asked a petitioner who challenged the judgement.
"We have travelled a distance of 60 years. Now it is test-tube babies, surrogate mothers. They are called discoveries. Is it in the order of nature? Is there carnal intercourse?" the judges asked.

Related Storie:

• India disowns call to ban gay sex
• India top court debates gay sex
• India court reviews gay sex order

SC gives green signal to interlinking of rivers project

New Delhi: The Supreme Court has asked the Centre to implement the interlinking of rivers project in a time-bound manner and to appoint a high-powered committee for its planning and implementation. The apex court observed that the project is in national interest.
The three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice S H Kapadia has appointed a high-powered committee comprising of Union Minister of Water Resources, its secretary, Secretary of Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) and four expert members appointed by Water Resources Ministry, Finance Ministry, Planning Commission, Ministry of Environment and Forest and NGO’s to monitor the project. Representatives from state governments, two social activists and senior advocate Ranjit Kumar, who has been assisting the court in the case, will also be members of the committee.
The court said that the committee will meet at least once in two months and its recommendations will be considered by the cabinet within 30 days of receipt. The project is a large-scale civil engineering project that aims to join the majority of India’s  rivers by canals and so reduce persistent water shortages in parts of India.
Plans for parts of the Indian rivers inter-link were mooted in the British period. In 1972 the then Minister for Irrigation K L Rao proposed a 2640 kilometer long link between the Ganges and Cauvery rivers.  In 1974 plans were proposed for the Garland canal. In 1982 the National Water Development Agency was set up to carry out surveys of the links and prepare feasibility studies.
The river interlinking project is considered the brainchild of the NDA government. In October, 2002, the then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had formed a task force to get the project going against the backdrop of the acute drought that year. A Centre-appointed task force had in a report recommended division of the project into two– the Peninsular component and the Himalayan component.
The Peninsular component– involving the rivers in southern India– envisaged developing a ‘Southern Water Grid’ with 16 linkages. This component included diversion of the surplus waters of the Mahanadi and Godavari to the Pennar, Krishna, Vaigai and Cauvery.
The task force had also mooted the diversion of the west-flowing rivers of Kerala and Karnataka to the east, the interlinking of small rivers that flow along the west coast, south of Tapi and north of Mumbai and interlinking of the southern tributaries of the river Yamuna.
The Himalayan component envisaged building storage reservoirs on the Ganga and the Brahmaputra and their main tributaries both in India and Nepal in order to conserve the waters during the monsoon for irrigation and generation of hydro-power, besides checking floods.
The task force had identified 14 links including Kosi-Ghagra, Kosi-Mech, Ghagra-Yamuna, Gandak-Ganga, Yamuna-Rajasthan, Rajasthan-Sabarmati, Sarda-Yamuna, Farakka-Sunderbans, Brahmaputra-Ganga, Subernarekha-Mahanadi, and Ganga-Damodar-Subernarekha.
The task force had also concluded that the linking of rivers in the country would raise the irrigation potential to 160 million hectares for all types of crops by 2050, compared to a maximum of about 140 million hectares that could be generated through conventional sources of irrigation.
The fate of the ambitious Rs 5,00,000 crore project proposing linkages between major rivers by the year 2016 has remained a virtual non-starter and the detailed project report (DPR) is in cold storage. The NRLP, if and when implemented, will be one of the biggest interbasin water transfer projects in the world.
Former president APJ Abdul Kalam had said good water management is needed to control floodwater and channel it for use during non-monsoon period and in drought-prone areas. In one of his speeches delivered in 2010 he spoke supporting the project. Kalam said interlinking of rivers would provide water to 86 drought-affected regions in the country. “The distribution of flood water through interlinking rivers with water bodies will provide water to drought-prone areas. Every year we receive millions of litres of water and most of it flows down to the sea while we face a water crisis. The water management will also help us in controlling water calamities, which every year claim many lives and destroy properties worth crores of rupees,” he said.
Giving the example of the 9% agriculture sector growth rate in Gujarat, Kalam said, “Water conservation and network of interlinking water bodies made the state record the highest growth rate compared to the rest of the country,”
Critics have alleged that the environmental impact of these projects would be extreme. Diverting water from so many rivers would have a serious impact on the mangroves of the coastal regions and hence on fish stocks, that extra irrigation will cause salt levels to rise and that the project will take precious, and disputed, water from Bangladesh international problems.

Landlords can evict shop tenants: SC

NEW DELHI: For 50 years, tenants in shops and commercial premises in many prime areas of Delhi have had the upper hand over landlords. They lived without fear of eviction and paid a paltry rent as they were protected by laws that froze the amount negotiated decades ago.

This special protection was because the law said that a tenant could be asked to vacate only residential

premises, and not commercial property even if the premises were required for personal use. But all this has changed.

The Supreme Court has given a judgment that would help landlords evict tenants in prime commercial zones like Connaught Place, Karol Bagh, South Extension and Walled City who, in most cases, have been paying a few hundred rupees as rent for decades.

The rent law - Delhi Rent Control Act, 1958 - was a handicap for the landlord as he could seek eviction of the tenant only from residential premises, that too provided he proved this was required for his personal need.

The attempts to evict the tenants from the shops had been frustrated for nearly 30 years as the rent law did not permit recovery of the premises let out for shops even on the ground of bonafide personal need.

The court said the restriction on eviction of tenants from commercial premises was inserted in the law 50 years ago mainly because of the limited commercial space available in the city at that time. But that was a long time back.

Now the scenario has undergone a sea change and a fairly large number of buildings and premises were now available on rent for non-residential and commercial purposes. Restricting landlords from seeking eviction of tenants from shops was no longer justified, the Bench said.

The 1995 Delhi Rent Control Act, which had a similar provision in favour of landlords, could not be notified despite receiving presidential assent as the government was pressured by the powerful traders lobby.

Section 14(1)(e) of the 1958 Act allowed a landlord to make an application for recovery of possession of a residential premises on the ground that "the premises let out for residential purposes are required by the landlord for occupation as a residence for himself or any other member of his family dependant on him... and that the landlord has no other reasonably suitable residential accommodation".

The new law would now read: "That the premises are required bonafide by the landlord for himself or for any member of his family dependant on him... and that the landlord has no other reasonably suitable accommodation".

Crucially, the apex court has deleted the word 'residential'. This makes the tenant eviction process apply with same rigour to rented premises - both residential and commercial.

Though the court removed the word 'residential' from Section 14(1)(e) of the Delhi Rent Control Act, it tried to strike a balance by laying down that recovery of rented premises still needed the landlord to prove that he needed it for his use and lacked alternate suitable accommodation.

Reversing a full Bench judgment of the Delhi High Court which had refused to alter the law in favour of the landlords on the ground that it had been in force for more than 45 years, the apex court said the HC failed to see that the provision in the 1958 Act has outlived its utility.

Writing the 64-page judgment for the Bench, Justice Singhvi said the high court failed to notice the differential treatment in law for residential and commercial premises, even though the rationale for it had long ceased to exist.

Removing this anomaly and striking down the differential approach in law, a Supreme Court bench comprising Justices B N Agrawal and G S Singhvi said landlords could now seek eviction of tenants from residential as well as commercial premises on the ground of proven personal need.

Through the judgment, the court came to the rescue of the family of a landlady who wanted to demolish the premises, part of which was let out for shops. She wanted to build a new structure to accommodate a family growing in size over the years.