NEW DELHI: Government officials convicted of wrongdoing can be made to pay compensation from their own salaries , a Delhi court has ruled.

Government institutions have often been sued for lapses or inaction and made to compensate victims, but it is unprecedented for individual officials to be told to pay the aggrieved parties from their own pockets.

The Delhi court gave the order on a petition filed by two Burari residents against the Delhi chief secretary and sub-divisional magistrate of Civil Lines after the administration demolished their farm’s boundary wall, citing “non-agricultural activity”.

While giving its verdict, the court referred to various Supreme Court judgments that state action can be taken against public servants if they abuse their office. “It is time that public servants be held personally responsible for their mala fide acts in the discharge of their functions. Public servants have to be made liable for damages for malicious, deliberate or injurious wrong-doing...,” additional district judge Kamini Lau said.

Petitioners Satpal and Yashpal told the court that they built the wall in December 1993 — after taking permission from the SDM — to protect their property from encroachment and save their crops from animals. The administration pulled it down without serving a notice, they said.

The accused officials alleged that Satpal and Yashpal broke the law when they built the wall and cited an inspection by a revenue director to accuse them of using their agricultural land for industrial purposes. Satpal and Yashpal contested this version and told the court that they filed an RTI in 2010 to know why their wall was razed but got no reply. In response to the RTI, the officials had said that the files were missing.

The court found merit in the petitioners’ submissions and termed the allegations levelled by the officials as “vague”. “The construction of a boundary wall cannot be treated as non-agricultural use of the property. The allegations (of running a factory on farmland) are vague and there is nothing on record to show... that the land in question was being put to non-agricultural use,” the court said, noting that the officials withheld information from the duo despite being asked by the chief information commissioner to reply to them. Also, if the files were indeed missing, there was no effort to trace them, the court pointed out.

“There was total departmental reluctance in providing the information… The relevant file and documents went missing and... have not even been placed before this court,” the judge said, ordering the government to file an FIR and identify the officials were responsible for misplacing the file.

The judge granted a compensation of Rs 3 lakh to the petitioners “to be paid from the public funds and then recovered from the erring officers by dividing it proportionately amongst them”.

