The Supreme Court today asked the Centre to do an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of its proposal to restore and restart the iconic Rabindra Rangshala which is currently in ruins in Central Ridge, a declared forest area.
A bench comprising justices J S Khehar and C Nagappan said if this open-air theatre, with a seating capacity for 8,000 people, is restarted it becomes necessary to ascertain the impact of it getting operationalised.
It directed the Ministry of Environment of Forests (MoEF) to ask its Forest Advisory Committee to do the EIA in present circumstances.
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The bench asked Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar, who is also assisting the court as amicus curiae, to coordinate and file the EIA of the project within four weeks and listed the matter for further hearing after six weeks.
The Ministry of Culture has moved the court seeking its nod to restore the iconic 'Rangshala' on the ground that no concrete structure would be set up and it is an attempt to revive the open theatre in the Upper Ridge area where several schools and the Ganga Ram Hospital are running with the permission of this court.
"The fault is that the schools and the hospital came to the court, we did not," Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, appearing for the Centre, said.
Environmentalist M C Mehta, who had filed the PIL on the issue, opposed the plea of the Centre saying that the Upper Ridge has been declared as forest and described as lungs of the city.
The 36-acre structure, conceived and created by the Rabindranath Tagore Centenary Committee headed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, was Delhi's cultural hot spot for three decades.
The unique double-storeyed open-air theatre, having a seating capacity of 8,000 people, is lying abandoned for last two decades after the Centre on the Supreme Court's intervention declared the Ridge a reserved forest in the mid-1990s.
