Pained by the recent death of three girls due to starvation in Delhi, the apex court on Thursday drew a parallel between the criminal wastage of food on one hand and the starvation deaths on the other.
Food that goes waste at wedding ceremonies has become a cause of concern for the Supreme Court.
Pained by the recent death of three girls due to starvation in Delhi, the apex court on Thursday drew a parallel between the criminal wastage of food on one hand and the starvation deaths on the other. They send across a message to authorities to serve public instead of commercial interest of motels and farmhouses hosting lavish weddings.
The occasion for the court to make this comment came during the hearing of a motel owner's plea against proceedings initiated against him by the Municipal Corporation and the Fire Safety Department for lack of permissions to carry out his business activities.
On being informed about the presence of a huge water storage facility of roughly one lakh litre capacity installed at the premise for hosting of marriage parties, the bench headed by Justices Madan B Lokur found it odd that on one hand, the Delhi government cries of shortage of drinking water, while on the other hand, it grants permission to such motels to store huge quantities of water.
With hundreds of motels and farmhouses existing in Delhi-NCR, the bench, which also included Justices Deepak Gupta and Hemant Gupta, said, "An application has been moved in the court by Delhi Government (in another case) requiring Haryana to release large quantity of water because of shortage of drinking water in Delhi....Roughly one lakh litre water is required by applicant for carrying on its business. There are hundreds of motels and farmhouses carrying out similar activities. One can only imagine the amount of water required for carrying on the functions by the applicant and others similarly placed." Surprisingly, the applicant was required to store 25,000 litre of water as per Fire Safety norms which it had failed to comply with.
The court then turned its attention to the food served at these places. "Tonnes of food is served at these functions including weddings and a large quantity of it goes waste. We are mentioning this in context of an unconfirmed report sometime back that three girls starved to death in Delhi. There is a huge amount of mismanagement of scarce water and wastage of food."
Calling the Chief Secretary of Delhi to appear in court on December 11, the bench added, "It is high time the authorities concerned with governance in Delhi give precedence to public interest rather than commercial and financial interest of owners of motels and farmhouses...the attitude of state including municipal corporations appears to be in favour of motels and farmhouse owners much to the detriment of public interest." The Court wanted the Chief Secretary to inform whether the Government was thinking on these lines as the judges intended to issue directions in this regard.
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