[dropcap]T[/dropcap]HE Gauhati High Court has issued notice on a public interest petition challenging the legality of a temple construction within the premises of the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati (IIT-G)and seeking a direction from the court to demolish the temple, impose financial penalties on those responsible for its construction and constitute an enquiry commission to investigate how a place of worship came to be built within the campus.
Notice was issued to the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Union of India and the Director of IIT-G, seeking their response to the petition by the first week of July 2019.
The writ petition, filed by an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Brijesh Kumar Rai and a research scholar pursuing his PhD from the same department, Vikrant Singh, stated that in response to an RTI application that they had filed, IIT-G had admitted that no permission to build the temple had been taken from the institute’s board of directors, as is mandatorily required, nor had the institute paid for its construction. However, the reply had also revealed that it was IIT-G that was paying for the temple’s electricity bills.
The petitioners claimed that they had on several occasions alerted the institute director, Prof Gautam Biswas, about the construction but to no avail. Rai, in particular, claimed he had even written to the Chairman of the Board of Governors of IIT-G, Rajiv I Modi, to stop the illegal construction of the temple and to ensure punishment of those involved but had not received any response.
“…the illegal construction of a temple in the campus of IIT-G is encroachment of public land. The said act has been carried out without any government approval. But on the other hand and in all likelihood, the same has been done with the tacit approval of certain influential officials of IITG. … Moreover, the institute has been providing electricity to the illegally constructed temple despite the fact that for any construction within IITG, the approval of its Board of Governors in mandatory and such approval had not been obtained for the construction of the temple,” the petitioners asserted.
Read PIL and High Court order here
[pdfviewer]https://cdn.theleaflet.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/12161106/PIL.pdf[/pdfviewer]
[pdfviewer]https://cdn.theleaflet.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/12161129/Court-Order_PIL.pdf[/pdfviewer]
