Editor's Pick: Is the Central Vista in the people's interest?

(The Editor's Pick is a new newsletter from The Hindu that provides a snapshot of the most important stories from today's edition of our newspaper, along with a note from our top editors on why we chose to give prominence to these stories.)

The Supreme Court has given the go ahead for the Centre's grand plan to build a larger Parliament building and redevelop the area that stretches from the India Gate to the Rashtrapathi Bhavan. The Central Vista project did not involve any foul play and did not merit heightened judicial scrutiny, said the majority opinion of the three-judge Bench that delivered the verdict. The court was ruling on a bunch of petitions that challenged the project on environment and land use grounds.

The majority opinion of Justices A.M. Khanwilkar and Dinesh Maheshwar made a key observation that the government was free to fail or succeed in a policy implementation, without judicial scrutiny. Justice Sanjeev Khanna in his dissenting opinion said that there was a lack of public consultation on the project. This is a criticism that that many experts have also raised -- that the changes in land use that allowed the project to take off were veiled in secrecy and that the public was kept out of the process of selecting the designs for the project.

The majority opinion sees development projects taken up by the government in accordance with the law as being in the people's interest — in fact, as a basic human right. The dissenting opinion, however, sees people's participation in the process as being the benchmark for taking people's interest into consideration. Along with the fact that India is now set to have a new Parliament in the 75th year of Independence, these different takes from the nation's highest court on what is or isn't in the people's interest are what makes this story important.

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