IMPORTANT POINT
The main legal point established in the judgment is the binding nature of promissory estoppel on the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) and the invocation of legitimate expectations to compel the MCGM to grant necessary permissions for redevelopment.

JUDGMENT :

GS Patel J.

1. Rule. There are Affidavits in Reply. Rule returnable forthwith.

2. This Petition reflects the kind of bureaucratic morass that might well have been an inspiration for Franz Kafka.

3. There is a road. Like many roads in Mumbai, it is narrower than it should be. The Municipal Corporation grants permission for redevelopment of a tall structure, one large enough to re-accommodate over a hundred tenants. It does so knowing that the road is not as wide as it should be. All 110 tenants vacate their homes. Construction commences. It comes up to the seventh floor. This is not sufficient to accommodate all the tenants. Nor is it the original proposal, which was for much more built up space. But it is only now that some functionary in the Ward Office awakens to the road width. He refuses permission to build higher. He says, astonishingly, that the road ‘is too narrow’. But the road is what it always was. It is not a living thing. It has neither expanded nor contracted since the time the original permission was sought and granted.

4. Implicit in this refusal is that the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (“MCGM”) is a complete stranger to its own roads and their widths. If this road was insufficiently wide to permit a development enough to accommodate all tenants, then no permission ought to have been granted to begin with.

5. In refusing permission, the MCGM is completely oblivious to every aspect of the law and by this we mean the relevant provisions of the Development Control and Promotion Regulations, 2034 (“DCPR”) and settled jurisprudence in this country, including the law on promissory estoppel, a branch of law that has held the field for the better part of six decades. We would be very surprised to hear from the MCGM that this law, almost all of it in pronouncements of the Supreme Court, is not binding on the MCGM. The MCGM is wrong. The law declared by the Supreme Court is not meant only to bind courts. It is binding on the MCGM too.

6. We do not propose to hold, nor even to suggest, that the MCGM must disregard entirely road widths. It cannot. But where it has granted permission on a given proposal for development set on a road with a known width, that permission cannot be refused at a later stage after the owner or the developer has spent money and acted on that permission to his or its prejudice by saying that the road width is insufficient. The MCGM would be fully entitled to refuse permission to an amended proposal for a higher structure or more built up space than originally proposed. But the MCGM cannot grant further permissions for the same/original proposal on the ground of insufficient road width if it has granted initial permissions to that very same proposal to begin with.

7. The Petitioner is the unfortunate owner of this property at CS Nos. 211 and 1/211 of the Tardeo division. The plot stands on Bapty Road, Mumbai 400 008. It is a cessed structure. It had 110 tenants or occupants. The development is under DCPR 33(7) which governs the redevelopment of cessed structures. Cess in this case obviously is a reference to the levy of repair cess under the provisions of the Maharashtra Housing Area and Development Authority Act, 1976 (“MHADA Act”).

8. The challenge in the Petition is to a communication of 10th January 2024 by the Assistant Engineer ‘D’ Ward, the 2nd Respondent, saying that since Bapty Road does not meet the required minimum width of 9 mts therefore, further permissions cannot be granted. The impugned order demands that the Petitioner comply with all Intimation of Disapproval (“IOD”) conditions and to resubmit the proposals.

9. Nobody knows what this is supposed to mean. We can make neither head nor tail of it. There is no case of non-compliance with an IOD condition. What seems to be suggested is that the Petitioner must somehow arrange to have Bapty Road widened on his own to a minimum width of 9 mts, notwithstanding the fact that this is a municipal road vested in the Municipal Corpor