Gujarat high court stays Nirma plant construction in Ahmedabad

A Gujarat high court bench headed by chief justice SJ Mukhopadhyaya has stayed the construction of Nirma Limited’s cement plant coming up in Mahuva taluka of Bhavnagar district.

The stay, however, will come into effect only from Thursday as the court has granted Nirma’s request that it be allowed to complete the construction of a concrete platform. The court also directed that there should be no change in the landscape or the topography of the construction site.

The bench has asked the lawyers of Nirma and the state government to submit, before March 31, a detailed affidavit along with satellite images of the land allotted to Nirma by the state government. The high court bench stayed the construction of the cement plant after lawyers representing local farmers objected to it on the ground that the land allotted to it by the state government included a water body. The farmers’ lawyers submitted to the court satellite images of the area acquired from the National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA), through the department of space, Hyderabad.

Lawyers for Shree Mahuva Bandhara Khetiwadi Paryavaran Bachav Samiti, Anand Yagnik and Bhushan Oza, stated that the satellite images acquired from NRSA as also from Google prove beyond doubt that there is a water body on the land allotted to the company.