Fifty-seven of eighty-three tenants have already signed and moved out, and the rest say the conditions were never met
Justices Suman Shyam and Gautam A. Ankhad dismissed nineteen petitions against eviction notices, declining to extend to Section 95A a jurisdictional bar laid down for Section 79-A.
A building in the Byculla Division of Mumbai, with a ground floor and three upper floors, holds twenty non-residential and sixty-three residential units. Its owners have undertaken its redevelopment under Regulation 33(7) of the Development Control Regulations, with permissions from the statutory authorities. As matters stand, about fifty-seven of the eighty-three tenants have surrendered possession and executed Permanent Alternate Accommodation Agreements.
The petitioners are the minority who have not. Nineteen writ petitions, raising a common challenge on identical facts, contested eviction notices issued against them on 12 August 2026 under Section 95A of the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Act, 1976. On 7 October 2026 a Division Bench dismissed all of them.
What the tenants were actually objecting to
Their counsel began by making clear that the petitioners are not opposed to the redevelopment of the building as such. The grievance is about sequence: that the developers have not complied with mandatory conditions imposed in the No Objection Certificate issued by the Housing Authority before commencing demolition of the existing structure.
Four conditions were named — Conditions 22, 24, 26 and 27 — and the complaints under them were specific. Non-execution of the Permanent Alternate Accommodation Agreements. Failure to provide important particulars in those agreements. Failure to provide the area entitlement of 425 square feet contemplated under the development control regulations. And failure to provide the corpus fund, and the ten per cent rehabilitation component construction cost by way of bank guarantee or fixed deposit.
Until those conditions are fulfilled, the argument ran, the question of vacating does not arise, so the eviction notices are premature, illegal and unwarranted.
The jurisdictional argument
The second limb was that the notices were issued by the wrong officer. On a conjoint reading of a series of provisions of the Act, counsel argued, the power to issue a notice under Section 95A vests only in the Board, and cannot be exercised by the Executive Engineer who issued these.
The argument was built on the delegation provision. Section 181 enables delegation of statutory powers, but confers that power of delegation only on the Authority and not on the Board; and there is no provision by which the Board can delegate or sub-delegate its powers to the Executive Engineer or anyone else.
For support the petitioners relied on a decision of this Court concerning Section 79-A, in which an Executive Engineer had been held not competent, and on Jugraj Tejraj and Sons.
Why the Section 79-A authority did not travel
The Bench read the first decision closely and found it had answered a different question on different facts. There the Court had decided the question in the negative by considering the flagrant abuse of power and non-compliance with essential requirements laid down under Section 79-A: it held that issuing notices based merely on visual inspections, without structural audits or declarations by a competent authority, constituted grave administrative overreach and abuse of statutory powers.
That decision, the Bench recorded, was reached after taking note of the facts of that case. It saw no reason to extend the jurisdictional disqualification accorded to an Executive Engineer for the purposes of Section 79-A to the exercise of power under Section 95A by applying those principles.
The distinction matters because the two sections do different work. Section 79-A concerns action on the condition of a building; Section 95A concerns eviction of occupants from a building already in a sanctioned redevelopment scheme. A finding that an officer cannot make a structural judgment without a structural audit does not establish that the same officer cannot issue a notice in a scheme that has already been sanctioned.
Jugraj Tejraj and Sons was of no assistance either. There a Co-ordinate Bench had reiterated the mandatory requirements of notice, hearing and fulfilment of the NOC conditions by the developer before action is initiated against occupants under Section 95A — but the authority of the Executive Engineer to issue the notice was not the issue raised in that case.
The NOC conditions
On the substantive complaint, the Court held that the concerns raised by the petitioners regarding non-compliance had been appropriately dealt with by the respondents in affidavits filed on 7 and 10 September 2026, and that the respondents are empowered under the scheme of the Act to remedy the situation in case of any further non-compliance.
It did not leave that entirely to good faith. Recording that the Advocate General had stated that the second to fifth respondents shall ensure compliance with the NOC conditions and take action in case of any breach, the Bench said it expects that to be followed in letter and spirit — an expectation placed on the record of a judgment, which is where an undertaking by a law officer becomes enforceable in practice.
The order
The Court found no jurisdictional error, no breach of natural justice and no illegality warranting interference under Article 226. The impugned proceedings have been initiated in furtherance of a sanctioned redevelopment scheme and within the framework of Section 95A, and the petitioners cannot be permitted to stall the project.
All the writ petitions were dismissed, rule was discharged, and there was no order as to costs. The petitions had been heard finally with the consent of the parties.