Shamshid Ahmed and fourteen others had been running a fish and poultry business on land in Mani Majra, on Chandigarh's periphery, for anywhere between twenty and thirty years by their own account. They said they had bought the land, built their sheds on it, and built a livelihood around it long before anyone questioned whether the structures belonged there. On 13 April 2026, the authorities issued an order for their demolition under the Punjab New Capital (Periphery) Control Act, 1952, the law that has governed unplanned construction around Chandigarh since the 1950s precisely to stop this kind of haphazard growth from swallowing the city's periphery.
The petitioners went to the Punjab and Haryana High Court to stop the demolition, and their strongest argument was not really about the Act's technical requirements at all. They leaned on Article 21 of the Constitution, arguing that tearing down the sheds that housed their fish and poultry operation would strip them of the livelihood they and their families had depended on for decades, and that the right to life under Article 21 has long been read to include a right to livelihood. They also argued that the demolition order ignored documents they had placed on record, denied them a fair hearing, and that in any event the authorities owed them a rehabilitation policy given how long they had occupied and worked the land.
A Division Bench of Justices Jasgurpreet Singh Puri and Pravindra Singh Chauhan was not moved. The right to livelihood under Article 21 protects a person's ability to earn a living through lawful means; it was never meant to convert an illegal activity, simply by virtue of having gone on long enough to become someone's livelihood, into a legal one. Accepting the petitioners' argument, the Bench reasoned, would hand every long-running illegal occupant of controlled land a ready-made defence: point to the years spent earning a living off the illegal structure, and use that history itself as the shield against enforcement. That would make the Periphery Control Act's entire regulatory scheme redundant, since nothing stops an illegal occupant from simply waiting long enough to acquire a livelihood-based immunity from the law meant to remove them.
On the electricity connections the petitioners had obtained for their sheds over the years, which they offered as evidence that their occupation had some official recognition behind it, the Court was equally direct. An electricity connection is a utility service, not a title document; it confers no right, title or interest over the land it serves, and a sanctioned meter number says nothing about whether the structure it powers was lawfully built in the first place.
The Bench dismissed the writ petition and let the 13 April 2026 demolition order stand. The petitioners' request for a rehabilitation policy, effectively asking the Court to direct the authorities to resettle them given their decades on the land, found no takers either; the Court's reasoning on the livelihood argument left little room to grant through the back door of rehabilitation what it had just refused through the front door of a stay on demolition.
This case sits in a familiar pattern for Chandigarh's periphery, where successive demolition drives over the decades, from slum clearances to encroachment removals at Mani Majra specifically, have repeatedly run into the same argument from long-settled occupants: that years of de facto occupation, often accompanied by utility connections and sometimes even informal tolerance from local authorities, should count for something when enforcement finally arrives. This ruling is a clear statement that it does not, at least not as a matter of constitutional entitlement capable of blocking demolition outright.
For agricultural and allied businesses, including fish farming, poultry and dairy operations, that have grown up informally on land not zoned or sanctioned for that use, particularly in fast-urbanising peripheries around planned cities, the lesson is a hard one: the longer an unauthorised operation runs, the more livelihoods and investment accumulate around it, but none of that converts into a legal defence against the regulatory scheme the land was always subject to. Rehabilitation, if it comes at all, is a matter of policy and official discretion, not something a court will carve out as a substitute for the legality the operation never had.