JAIPUR: The Jal Mahal land lease agreement dispute reached the Supreme Court on Thursday, as was widely anticipated.

The private company, the Jal Mahal Resorts Pvt Ltd that was to lose the lease after the Rajasthan High Court declared the agreement illegal, filed a special leave petition (SLP) before the apex court, challenging the verdict passed on May 17. The SLP was mentioned before a division bench of Justice Deepak Verma and Justice SJ Mukhopadhaya that directed that the case to be listed again on Friday.

New Delhi: Next time you visit Qutub Minar, take care not to litter. Or you may just find yourself being forced to pick it up and junk it in the bin by a volunteer. You better keep toilets in the complex clean and don’t scribble on the pillars and walls. As part of the Clean India campaign, volunteers will interact with visitors everyday to keep the world heritage monument clean.

Delhi Metro’s ‘Heritage Corridor’ has hit a roadblock once again. The Phase III project is stuck in a deadlock between the National Monument Authority (NMA) and the Delhi Metro with the former insisting on a “structural impact study” to be conducted by IIT in Delhi or Roorkee. However, Delhi Metro wrote to the NMA last week informing that both the institutes have refused to conduct the study citing lack of expertise.

KOLKATA, 26 APRIL: The compliance report of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) was conspicuous by its absence among similar reports of different state government departments concerning Victoria Memorial which were placed before the Division Bench of Mr Justice Pinaki Ghosh and Mr Justice Mrinalkanti Choudhuri of Calcutta High Court last week.

Avoids Giving National Monument Status To Geographical Feature In Palk Strait. The Centre on Thursday shied away from taking a stand in the Supreme Court on whether it intended to confer national monument status on Ram Sethu, a geographical feature in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka resembling the mythological bridge built by Lord Rama’s army in epic Ramayana.

The Centre came up with a blank today on whether to declare Ram Setu in the Palk Strait a national monument, leaving the Supreme Court with no option but to interpret the government’s silence as its unwillingness to take a position “this way or the other”.

The CAG in its latest report on land allotments in Andhra Pradesh, related to the Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy government tenure, found fault with the allotment of land for his school “in violation of Andhra Pradesh Ancient and Historical Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Rules 1960,” which prohibits alienation of lands forming part of historical sites.

Residents Flout Heritage Law, Illegal Structures Rise Within 100M Of Monument
Khirki village in south Delhi has no time for heritage laws. From the roof of its Tughlaq-era Khirki Masjid, you can see workers with hammers at work inside houses and scaffoldings raised along the walls of buildings creeping up an arm’s length away, even as drilling machines drown out all other sounds in the vicinity. This, when rules for the protection of national monuments clearly prohibit construction within 100 metres, and allow it between 100-300 metres only after permission from heritage bodies.

The high court on Wednesday directed the Victoria Memorial Hall curator to prepare an inventory of the exhibits in the museum within four weeks and table it before the bench hearing the case. The division bench of Justice P.C. Ghose and Justice M.K. Chakrabarti passed the order after green activist Subhas Datta submitted that the memorial authorities had been sitting on a 1993 order of the court seeking a report on the exhibits.

KOLKATA, 29 FEB: The curator of Victoria Memorial was directed by the Division Bench of Mr Justice Pinaki Ghosh and Mr Justice Mrinalkanti Choudhuri of Calcutta High Court today to make an inventory of the exhibits in this marble mausoleum and give an affidavit to the court within four weeks. The court also directed environmental activist Subhas Dutta to give a copy of his petition regarding not making an inventory of these exhibits.