The Bombay High Court and Mumbai's Silence Zones

In one line

The Bombay High Court supervised noise enforcement in Maharashtra for years, the State amended the Rules in 2017 to unwind part of it, and the Court held that an amendment does not by itself make a subsisting direction inoperative.

In exam wording: in public interest litigation numbered 173 of 2010 the Bombay High Court delivered a final judgment containing directions on the enforcement of the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000 in Maharashtra, including a declaration in clause (xii) of paragraph 93 concerning silence zones; after the notification of 10 August 2017 amending rule 3(5) the Advocate General contended that the declaration had become inoperative, and by its order of 29 August 2017 the Court held prima facie that the directions could not be held inoperative on that basis and that the State would have to apply for review or modification of the final judgment.

Why Mumbai has its own chapter on this

Because the Supreme Court's directions in the 2005 noise judgment were national and general, and what a Mumbai student actually meets is a body of Bombay High Court supervision that is specific, continuous and contested.

Two features of it are worth understanding before the case.

It is continuing supervision, not a single judgment. The proceedings ran for years, with compliance being reported and directions being refined, in the manner the chapter on the writ jurisdiction in Module IV describes.

And it was resisted by the State. That is unusual enough to be the point of this chapter. The regulator here was not a reluctant industry but the State Government, and the instrument it used to resist was an amendment to the very Rules the Court was enforcing.

The case

Mahesh Vijay Bedekar v. State of Maharashtra, Public Interest Litigation No. 173 of 2010 and connected matters, Bombay High Court, A.S. Oka and Riyaz I. Chagla JJ, order dated 29 August 2017.

Facts. The Court had delivered a final judgment in the petition containing directions on the enforcement of the Noise Rules in Maharashtra, among them the declaration in clause (xii) of paragraph 93 concerning silence zones. A challenge to that judgment by way of a special leave petition had failed, and the judgment had become final.

On 22 August 2017 the State Government placed on record, by an affidavit of an Under Secretary in the Environment Department, a copy of the notification dated 10 August 2017 amending the Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules 2000. On the strength of it the Advocate General contended that the declaration in clause (xii) of paragraph 93 had become inoperative, the Rules having been amended.

Held. The Court, having heard argument at length, expressed the view, prima facie, that: