A developmental plan published under statutory authority is legally enforceable and imposes legal obligations on landowners and public authorities. The common law rights of ownership must give in to the statutory restrictions imposed by a developmental plan.

P. A. CHOUDHARY, J.

( 1 ) THE broad question that falls for consideration is whether the Life Insurance Corporation of India and the Income-tax Department, Hyderabad, can legally use the land owned by them in a recreational zone within the city limits of Hyderabad for residential purposes contrary to the developmental plan published in G. O. Ms. No. 414 M. A. dt. 27-9-1975.

( 2 ) ALTHOUGH the City of Hyderabad was founded about 400 years ago in 1951 (sic) around the present area of the historic Charminar, its growth till recently was never regulated by settled laws. During these four centuries, the city had grown in all directions without any plan or design. Particularly after the formation of the State of Andhra Pradesh and in the aftermath of the second world war, this city had started growing wildly and almost as an uncultivated jungle. For the first time, its civic problems have, therefore, become unmanageable. Although by size and population, Hyderabad is today one of the country s biggest cities, it is a city without any effective and satisfactory provision for elementary civic amenities to its inhabitants. Passers by praise it while its permanent residents curse it. Absence of a development plan coupled with the presence of an unimaginative and indifferent administration has been the cause of this malady. For too long a time rule of law is not fully enforced here. The city has been for long in the grip of several well known city landgrabbers. Being most of the time insensitive to the civil needs of the community and acting largely to the dictates of the power brokers, the Government has been often aiding and abetting this maladministration. Multi-storied buildings are allowed to be built up contrary to municipal bye-laws. Transgressings of municipal laws in general and the building bye-laws in particular are generally condoned. New areas are allowed to be developed even without any provision being made for the minimum civic needs. Today, on a rough estimate, the city has more than 100 slums spreading dirt, disease and squalor everywhere. Roaming herds of king size buffaloes and pale pathetic and hungry locking cows passing through the city thoroughfares and posing serious traffic hazards both to motorist and pedestrian are a regular sight of some of the city main roads. Probably nowhere else in India, the citizen s fundamental right to move freely is so heavily trampled upon by the beast as it is done on the roads of this city. Regulation of city traffic is a neglected item of the traffic police. Much of traffic on the impossibly narrow roads of the city wends through when it moves at all on its own motion while the traffic police merrily watches and whistles aimlessly. The so-called local lorries occupy many a congested parts of the city roads without being charged for violation of laws and with the traffic police taking no preventive or prohibitive action. In most parts of the city drainage and sewerage systems even where they exist do not function well. Consequently, most of the city inhabitants are condemned to live in their houses without access to pure air or water and under unhygienic conditions. Spread over 120 square miles and having one hundred and above slum dwelling areas and not having enough of open spaces developed for the recuperation of the health of the city inhabitants, and going without bare minimum of civil amenities the city of Hyderabad is painfully dying a civic death. Large chunks of public land that could have been freely used and developed by the city corporation for the common purposes of the community are generally occupied and appropriated by the land grabbers, of late even Gods have joined this unwholesome game by establishing their abodes on the busy roads openly obstructing the free flow of traffic. Land grabbing makes the availability of public land for public purposes such as creation of recreational parks almost impossible. Notwithstanding the frequent claims made by the city corporati

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