What is the best photograph of government corruption?

Here is the apartment H2O Holy Faith, next to the edge of a lake, the Vembanad Lake in Kochi, Kerala in India.

On Saturday at 11.18 am, the building was brought down.

It was not alone.

Three other apartments also shared its fate.

Alfa Serene, on the very same day.

The next day, another apartment, Jain Coral Cove

Again, on that same day, Golden Kayaloram, the smallest of the lot.

Why were these buildings demolished?

It was because they were built on Maradu, a municipality lying in a Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ).

Maradu had upgraded to a municipality from a panchayat (village council) in 2010. In September 2006, the panchayat offered permits to four companies to construct five apartment complexes.

This was done without informing the Kerala State Coastal Zone Management Authority (KSCZMA).

Nine months after issuing the permission, the Maradu gram panchayat, following a directive from the KSCZMA, issued notices to these builders alleging violation of CRZ norms.

Coastal Regulation Zones are classified into 4 - CRZ-I, CRZ-II, CRZ-III and CRZ-IV. Depending on the zone type, certain activities are limited. For example, in a CRZ-III area, no construction is allowed within 200 metres from the coast. In a CRZ-II zone, works are allowed beyond 50 metres from the coast.

In Maradu’s case, it was lying in a CRZ-III zone, and those buildings were awfully close.

The builders were not happy. They approached the Kerala High Court in 2007, and obtained a stay order.

KSCZMA, however, didn’t give up. They went to the Supreme Court, and argued that Maradu offered the permits without their concurrence, and since CRZ areas were managed by them, it was well within their authority to withdraw the permits.

Maradu panchayat, argued that it is a CRZ-II zone, that was mistakenly categorized as a CRZ-III. Hence, the CRZ norms were not broken, and the constructions are not illegal.

Last year, the Supreme Court created a technical committee to verify these claims.

Their findings?

The Coastal Zone Management Plan was approved in Kerala in 1996. Maradu was classified as a CRZ-III zone, since it was a rural area. As per a new notification in 2011, Maradu was to be categorized as a CRZ-II zone. However, it was not approved by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change so far.

Maradu, hence, remains a CRZ-III zone.

On May 8, 2019, the Supreme Court issued an order to raze the buildings.

It came as a rude shock to the building residents. Several political parties and organisations rallied behind the residents and staged protest marches. The Supreme Court refused to entertain another batch of review petitions filed by the residents and ordered the State government to execute the order.

The Kerala government dilly-dallied on the implementation of the court order. Finding that the government did not comply with this order, the Supreme Court issued an ultimatum.

The buildings must be demolished by September 20, 2019.

For the 400+ families residing in these apartments, it was a death knell for them.

Though the demolition was prolonged due to the state government and the Maradu Municipality trying to place the ball in the other’s court over the costs, it eventually happened in the previous week.

Those apartments, razed to the ground.

That lush, green landscape covered with a sheet of dust.

Some of the debris fell into the ecologically sensitive waters, and into the surrounding areas, which house many other families.

Humongous quantities of steel, cement and other building materials were wasted, not to mention hours of human effort.

And the biggest loss was for none other than the apartment owners, where a majority of them used their savings to buy these apartments. All of it gone.

In just a few seconds.

With all of these consequences that arose (and are yet to come) due to the demolition order, did the Supreme Court do the right thing?

If you take one perspective, then the order was necessary.

Kerala has been reeling from continuous floods, and the most devastating one happened in 2018. One of the reasons behind these floods is due to the rise of illegal constructions.

Such an order, would probably prevent more illegal constructions from happening.

However, from another perspective, we have people getting punished for buying an apartment, instead of the builders, and the officials who had received bribes.

Instead of fixing the existing rules and regulations, and placing timely management on checks of illegal construction activities, the government decided to take the easy way out.

By demolishing these apartments.

How long will they continue to keep placing band-aids to cover-up the underlying causes?

We will have to wait and see.

Replied by Sneha Mathews thru Quora