NEW DELHI, NOVEMBER 28: The Chief Secretary of the Delhi government, P.S. Bhatnagar, today apologised to the Supreme Court but maintained that the failure to drive the polluting industries out of the residential areas was not due to any "wilful disobedience" of the judicial orders but rather "the massive scale of the problem."The bench headed by Justice B.N. Kirpal however expressed dissatisfaction at Bhatnagar's response to the contempt notice issued to him and the commissioner of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, S.P. Aggarwal, on November 14 for their failure to comply with the court's orders since 1996.The Delhi government, K.K. Venugopal, sought to counter the contempt notice by saying though the administration had been giving quarterly reports on its efforts to implement the orders, ``you never told us till as late as September that we had failed to obey the orders.'' The judges reacted with a sarcastic question: ``Was it our duty to point that out to you?''Adjourning the contempt proceedings by a day, the court directed the government to revert with exact information on how many polluting and non-conforming industries have been added in the residential areas of Delhi since 1996.This is because Venugopal could only give figures relating to 1996 when, he said, a survey conducted by the Delhi pollution control committee showed that there were in all 1.25 lakh industries out of which 97,411 industries did not conform to the Master Plan.Venugopal asserted that the government was not so much concerned about the owners of the offending industries as about the much larger number of workers who were going to be hit. Referring to the 1,325 major industries closed in 1996-97, he said the court had at that time spared no efforts to ensure that the workers were given some protection such as six years of wages and permission to stay in their quarters for one and half years.But when it came to industries in the residential areas, the court, Venugopal said, was not displaying the same kind of concern about the welfare of the workers.The bench said: ``The human problem was not for you alone. You should have taken the court into confidence.''Other reasons Venugopal gave for the slow progress of the drive against polluting and non-conforming industries were the paucity of money, the problems involved in acquiring land around Delhi and the adverse environmental impact on the areas where the industries are relocated.Given the ``magnitude and complexity'' of the problem, and despite all the efforts ``to the best of our abilities,'' the government cannot comply with the court orders till 2002, he added.
