On June 3, bulldozers razed close to 150 homes in Surat’s Nasirnagar slum settlement, near Katargam. Around 100 families lost their houses. No government agency has accepted responsibility for ordering the demolition, a gap that has kept the case in front of the Gujarat High Court for weeks under the label “ghost demolition,” reports Vibes of India. Justice Nikhil Kariel has directed the Surat Municipal Corporation to submit a rehabilitation plan, ordered the police commissioner to explain in a personal affidavit why no FIR was filed, and told Torrent Power to disclose who instructed it to disconnect power to the shanties before they came down. SMC has since suspended five civil engineering officials and opened a departmental inquiry.
Why nobody claimed the demolition
Informal settlements get cleared across Gujarat’s cities routinely, often ahead of monsoon flood-clearing drives or infrastructure projects. Nasirnagar is unusual because three separate parties, SMC, the police, and a private power utility, were all present or involved in some capacity, yet each has denied ordering the demolition itself. SMC officials told the court they had visited only for land demarcation. That is what pushed a routine civic clearance into a constitutional question: Justice Kariel has said even the demolition of a single house without due process cannot be allowed to stand, and the court is now working backward through the electricity disconnection, the absence of a police complaint, and the missing demolition order to establish who actually gave the instruction.
Surat has had a rough stretch on construction and civic accountability this year. Within days of the Nasirnagar demolitions coming to light, a six-storey building collapsed in the city’s Sachin industrial area, and a wall came down at a complex in Sachin GIDC. Those incidents are unrelated to Nasirnagar, but together they have put SMC’s oversight of construction, demolition, and enforcement under sustained scrutiny this monsoon season.
What it means for residents
For the roughly 100 displaced families, the court’s order is the first concrete step toward rebuilding, but it does not set a firm deadline, and rehabilitation plans ordered by courts in comparable Gujarat demolition disputes have taken months to become actual housing. For residents of informal settlements elsewhere in Surat, the case sets a precedent worth tracking: it shows a civic body, a police force, and even a private utility can each be compelled to account for a demolition none of them will claim, provided a court is willing to keep pulling the thread.
Outlook
Torrent Power’s explanation of who ordered the disconnection could be the detail that finally identifies who authorised the demolition. Whether SMC’s rehabilitation plan offers on-site reconstruction, alternate housing, or compensation will determine how much the court’s intervention actually delivers for the families still displaced.
Sources: Vibes of India, LatestLY
This report was compiled and written with AI assistance from publicly reported sources, and reviewed for accuracy.