Court supports elderly widow in row over house
A widow has a right to enjoy the property purchased by her husband in her name, and her daughter and son-in-law cannot lay claim over it, a Delhi court has held.
The observation was made while deciding the case in favour of Lajwanti Devi, 65, who had moved the court against her refusal of her daughter and sonin-law to vacate a portion of the house in north-west Delhi’s Shastri Nagar.
“Lajwanti Devi has a right to enjoy the property purchased by her husband in her name, in the manner she wants,” the court said, asking the couple to vacate the house within six months.
It said that the property was purchased by Devi’s husband in 1966 in her name to “provide her a secure life” after his death and her daughter and son-in-law only had “permissive possession” of the house.
The couple was told to pay ₹10,000 per month to Devi from the time of institution of the suit in 2014 and ₹10,000 per month from the date of the judgment till the handing over of the possession of the house, with interest.
It has completed four projects so far.
Asked the reason for the slow implementation, Sameer Sharma, additional secretary incharge of the smart cities programme in the ministry, told HT, “It’s the tendering (to award projects) that takes time. We are following a complex tendering process unlike normal tendering where the lowest bidder is awarded projects. A lowest bidder might not have the requisite expertise to carry out a smart city project.”
Sharma added that the implantation was on track and cities were confident they would be able to show results on the ground.
The ministry, however, claimed that all the 20 cities selected in the first batch had firmed up their investment plans, achieving an overall Investment Conversion Rate (ICR) of 49%. The ICR indicates the extent of conversion of approved smart city plans into investment through groundlevel implementation.
Five cities, including Nagpur, Vadodara and Surat, have achieved an ICR of 90%.
“Firming up investment, however, does not mean that work has started on the ground. It just paves the ground for expeditious award of projects,” said a ministry official who did not wish to be named.
Under the smart city programme, each city will be given ~500 crore by the Centre over five years. The states will have to make a matching contribution.
She tweeted: “I am sorry to know about the attack on Deep Rai, a US national of Indian-origin. I have spoken to Sardar Harpal Singh, father of the victim... He told me that his son had a bullet injury on his arm. He is out of danger and is recovering in a private hospital.
There have been many hatecrime attacks against Sikhs in America. Balbir Singh Sandhu was the first victim of a backlash in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by a man who mistook him for a Middle Easterner because of his turban. Six Sikhs were gunned down in a gurudwara in Wisconsin in 2013 by a white supremacist. Members of the community have often complained of suffering slurs and hateful behaviour all around the country.
The Sikh community is fighting back by launching efforts to address the problem, which, in part stems from misconceptions about its religion and, in a large part, its identity. The Sikh Coalition is an advocacy group that works with the FBI in fighting this hostility.
“While we appreciate the efforts of state and local officials to respond to attacks like this, we need our national leaders to make hate crime prevention a top priority,” Rajdeep Singh of the Sikh Coalition said in a statement. “Tone matters in our political discourse because this is a matter of life or death for millions of Americans who are worried about losing loved ones to hate.”
That was a guarded reference to the divisiveness that has swept the United States since the election of President Donald Trump in November, with an immediate and perceptible rise in attacks against minority communities such Jews, blacks, Hispanics, and now Indians and Sikhs.
Trump denounced the Kansas shooting and all instance of hatecrimes in his maiden speech to the joint session of congress, but, as the Sikh Coalition’s Singh said, American leaders need to “make hate crime prevention a top priority”.