The Supreme Court on Tuesday gave the green signal for the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI) and the Centre to acquire land for the construction of the 277.3-km Chennai-Krishnagiri-Salem national highway project worth over ₹10,000 crore, saying “national highways are the arteries of India’s economy”.

The eight-lane highway (NH179A and NH179B) is part of the first phase of the ‘Bharatmala Pariyojna’ project, which stretches across 24,800 km and has an estimated outlay of ₹5.35-lakh crore, to improve the efficiency of freight and passenger movement across the country by bridging critical infrastructure gaps.

“By its very nomenclature, a national highway is to link the entire country and provide access to all in every remote corner of the country for interaction and to promote commerce and trade, employment and education, including health related services. This approach enhances and furthers the federal structure. The existence of a national highway in the neighbourhood paves way for the fulfilment of aspirations of the locals and their empowerment,” a three-judge Bench led by Justice AM Khanwilkar observed in the 140-page judgement.

The highway intends to cut travel time between Chennai and Salem by half. However, the project had faced opposition from locals, including farmers, over fears of losing their land, besides environmentalists who were against the felling of trees. The project runs through reserve forest and water bodies.

Environmental clearance

But the court said the highway project is “dedicated for the ordinary and reasonable user of the road as a national highway from one designated town (Chennai) up to another town (Salem)”. It would be open for affected persons to approach the appropriate forum on the correctness or validity of the environment clearances, the judgement said.

Justice Khanwilkar, who authored the judgement, said the Madras High Court had been wrong to quash the acquisition proceedings on the ground that no prior environmental clearance was taken.

The apex court said it was too premature to have got such clearances. The government was not required by law to get them as it had, at the time, only expressed an “intention” to acquire certain land under Section 3A of the National Highway Act. It had also merely notified a certain stretch or a section of area to be a ‘national highway’ under Section 2(2) of the Act. No land had been vested with the NHAI.

“Prior environmental clearance under the Environment (Protection) Act and Rules of 1986 is required to be taken before commencement of the “actual construction or building work” of the national highway by the executing agency (NHAI). That will happen only after the acquisition proceedings are taken to its logical end until the land finally vests in the NHAI or is entrusted to it by the Central Government for building/management of the national highway,” the Supreme Court held.

The court asked how it was possible to get environmental clearance before even identifying the exact site for the highway.

However, the court agreed with the High Court that neither the government nor NHAI had any business altering the mutation entries of specified lands in their favour, that too, even before they had come into possession of these properties. The court upheld the High Court decision to restore the earlier entries in the revenue records.

Centre’s power

Justice Khanwilkar rejected arguments made by petitioners that the Centre and the NHAI do not have the power to pick green areas in a State and acquire them for a highway. According to the petitioners, Centre’s power was limited to designating an existing road as a ‘national highway’.

“The Central government is free to construct a new national highway through any part of a State in order to empower the people… It is imperative to provide a highway to assuage the perennial difficulties faced by the locals in that belt due to lack of access,” the court reasoned.

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