News Published On: Apr 22, 2023 11:32 PM IST
Delhi: The Delhi high court has held the city chief secretary, special commissioner (transport), and the labour secretary guilty of contempt of court for willfully disobeying orders passed by its division bench in December 2017.
In 2017, the division bench directed the city government’s transport department to make necessary amends to the agreements entered into with private players running public transport buses in the national capital and increase the wages of the staff.
The court asked the contemnors to be present before it on July 14 for the next hearing, when it would also hear the arguments on sentence.
In the order passed on April 21, justice Rekha Palli noted that even though the government’s review petition and the special leave petition (SLP) filed in the Supreme Court against the 2017 order were dismissed, the orders of the division bench have not been implemented in their true sense.
The court said that the directions issued by the division bench were “crystal clear” and “the contemnors were expected to effectuate necessary amendments by working out the amount payable to each cluster individually”.
“In the light of the aforesaid, I am of the opinion that in the present case, all the four pre-conditions for holding the respondents guilty of contempt are made out,” the court added.
“In the present case, the respondents, despite having repeatedly failed in their challenge to the order passed by the division bench are deliberately attempting to circumvent and undermine the unambiguous directions issued by the bench. It is, therefore, necessary to deal with the respondents with a heavy hand,” the court observed.
