Close illegal water units or face action, Collectors warned

A division bench comprising Justice Vineet Kothari and Justice R Suresh Kumar in consequence to the earlier orders passed on closing units functioning without due license, said, “If all the units illegally drawing water without a valid licence are not closed by the next date of hearing, the personal responsibility shall be fixed on these officials. They may be required to deposit substantial amounts with the Registry of this Court from their personal resources to ensure further punctual compliance of the directions of this Court.”

“If any non-compliance is brought to our notice on the next date of hearing, the said concerned officials will remain present in the Court on the further next date fixed by us, without fail,” the bench said.

The direction was based on the Government pleader’s submission that out of the total number of water purifying units operating in the 31 Districts in the State excluding Chennai, which comes under Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority, as many as 567 units have No Objection Certificates (NOCs), whereas 261 units do not have any NOCs or their NOCs have not been renewed by the competent authorities.

Kancheepuram and Tiruvallur have significantly larger number of water purifying units with them possessing 110 units and 111 units respectively. Out of them, 86 in Kancheepuram and 96 in Tiruvallur alone have valid licenses while the remaining are functioning illegally.

Also, the bench on recording the Government’s Ground Water Reserve Assessment, 2017 which revealed that of the total 1166 firkas in Tamil Nadu, 462 of them lie in Over Exploited zones, 79 in Critical Zone and 163 lie in Semi Critical Zone while 427 firkas are in Safe Zone and another 35 in Saline / Poor Quality Zone, directed the State Government to produce before it the Policy Decision as a whole about the cap on the number of Water Purifying Units depending upon the availability of ground water in the State.

“If no such Policy Decision is already taken by the State Government, such a decision deserves to be taken by them taking into account the scarcity of water resources in the State. The concerned and competent authorities may take such Policy Decision and produce the same also before this Court on the next date of hearing,” the bench held while posting the plea to February 26 for further hearing.