HC slams Haryana on flood safety, orders scientific disaster plan

The Punjab and Haryana High Court has held Haryana accountable for failing in its constitutional duty to ensure flood safety along the Tangri river. The Bench of Justice Sureshwar Thakur and Justice Vikas Suri also directed the State to prepare a scientific disaster management plan and fund structural safeguards to prevent recurrent flooding. The court also made it clear that the State could not shift the burden of its inaction onto private landowners.

The assertions came as the Bench quashed a notification dated September 6, 2012, whereby the State had notified the Final Development Plan-2025 AD for Ambala. The Bench also directed Haryana to implement remedial measures, including strict adherence to its own disaster management plan, deployment of a team of experts to draft a scientific flood mitigation strategy, allocation of adequate funds for structural safeguards and designing flood-resistant infrastructure to curb inundation effects.

The Bench also said the State might impose reasonable cesses on the affected landowners to create a corpus for building protective embankments. The creation of upstream diversions in unpopulated areas to control water volume downstream was also directed.

Quashing a notification that reclassified land in Ambala from ‘residential’ to ‘agricultural’ and barred land-use change, the Bench observed that the State had been "ex facie apathetic" towards flood management. It asserted that "the respondent-State is a welfare state, whereby within the ambit of Article 21 of the Constitution of India, it becomes encumbered with a constitutional duty to ensure the protection of the lives and properties of its citizens."

The case stemmed from a petition by an infrastructure development company challenging the 2012 notification restricting development on its 95.431-acre land. The State cited the seasonal swelling of the Tangri as justification, but the court found that scientific flood mitigation measures had not been taken. “The waters of river Tangri can be stated to be owned by the State of Haryana. If so, the avoidance of swelling of its waters, and the consequent ill effects onto the lands, which occur on its banks, is also the onerous duty of the State of Haryana,” the court said.

“There would not have been any threat to the residents of thickly populated colonies along the Tangri river, nor would the petitioner's proposed residential project have faced restrictions” had the State undertaken these measures earlier, it said. It also stressed that disaster management could not be a post-event reaction, but must be based on pre-emptive planning and scientific safeguards.

Allowing the petition, the court reiterated that the State must balance public safety with property rights through proactive flood management rather than arbitrary land-use restrictions. Besides this, urban planning must incorporate scientific flood control measures instead of resorting to blanket bans that stifled development without addressing the root cause of inundation.