Moving the park is not the same as taking it away: a revised villa layout is restored on the numbers

Chief Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh and Justice Vakiti Ramakrishna Reddy set aside a Single Judge's direction to rebuild to the original 2004 layout, holding that 8,833 square yards of park area met the open-space requirement and that no substantive prejudice was shown.

A house owners' association and individual villa owners went to court saying the developer had not built the layout they bought into: the parks and open spaces had been moved from where the 2004 plan put them. In June 2025 a Single Judge agreed, set aside the revised layout permissions, and ordered the constructions brought into conformity with the original layout within three months, imposing costs on both the authorities and the developer. On 1 October 2026 a Division Bench of the Telangana High Court reversed all of it — because the revised layout still contained more open space than the rules required, and nothing had been built on the part that moved.

Four appeals against one order

The appeals were preferred under Clause 15 of the Letters Patent against a common order dated 9 June 2025 passed by the Single Judge in two writ petitions of 2023. By that order the writ petitions filed by the respondent association and individual villa owners were allowed: the revised layout permissions were set aside, the authorities were directed to bring the constructions into conformity with the original layout within three months, and costs were imposed upon the official authorities and the developer entities.

Two of the four appeals were brought by the Hyderabad Metropolitan Development Authority, represented by the Advocate General, and two by the developer companies through senior counsel. Because the parties, facts and questions of law were common, they were heard together and disposed of by a common judgment delivered by Justice Vakiti Ramakrishna Reddy, with one of the 2023 writ petitions treated as the lead matter.

What the open-space requirement actually asked for

The Bench's analysis is arithmetic before it is anything else, and that is its strength.

A revised layout, it held, is not to be interfered with “merely because the location and configuration of the park/open spaces were altered from the original 2004 layout”. What matters is whether the requirement was met. The revised layout retained 8,833 square yards of park area, constituting approximately 10.12 per cent of the revised layout area, “thereby satisfying the applicable open-space requirement”.

The second finding came from the writ petitioners themselves. They had admitted that the extent of 1,718 square yards was adjusted by providing corresponding park and open-space areas, and that no construction had been raised over that extent. So the land said to have been taken from the parks was neither lost to open space nor built upon.

“In the absence of any demonstrated substantive prejudice or deprivation of the requisite open-space entitlement”, the Bench concluded, the grievance did not warrant restoration of the entire layout to its 2004 configuration. The relief the Single Judge had granted was, in effect, out of proportion to the complaint that had been proved.

Two further circumstances weighed in the same direction: the subsequent permissions issued in 2015 and 2017, and material indicating that the petitioners had prior knowledge of the revised arrangement. Having regard to those, and to the admitted position on the record, the directions to restore the development in conformity with the original 2004 layout “were not warranted”. Knowledge of the revised arrangement mattered because it bore on whether the villa owners had been misled at all, and the permissions of 2015 and 2017 showed that the revision had been acted upon openly and for years before the writ petitions were filed in 2023. The setting aside of the revised layout permissions, founded principally on an alleged deprivation of the original park area, could not be sustained.

It is worth being precise about what the Single Judge had ordered, because the Division Bench reversed all three limbs of it. The revised layout permissions were set aside; the authorities were directed to bring the constructions into conformity with the original layout within three months; and costs were imposed on the official authorities and the developer entities alike. For a project of completed villas, a direction to restore a 2004 configuration is not a paper exercise — it is a demolition-and-rebuild order against structures that had stood on the strength of permits issued in 2013, 2015 and 2017.

Order

The writ appeals were allowed. The common order of 9 June 2025 was set aside and the two writ petitions dismissed.

With that, four separate approvals came back to life: the revised layout permit of 26 April 2013, the building permit of 20 January 2015, the revised permit of 3 November 2017, and an order of the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation dated 9 January 2023. There was no order as to costs, and pending miscellaneous applications stood closed — which also removes the costs the Single Judge had imposed on the authorities and the developers.