The Uttarakhand High Court has dismissed a public interest litigation (PIL) seeking to halt the construction of the proposed “Sainik Dham” in Guniyal village, Dehradun, holding that the land in question is not forest land and there is no legal basis to stop the project.
A division bench of Justices Manoj Kumar Tiwari and Subhash Upadhyay ruled against the plea filed by petitioner Vikas Singh Negi, who had alleged that the state government was undertaking construction on land whose nature had not been properly verified. The PIL claimed the site was forest land and sought a range of reliefs including a stay on construction, transfer of the land to the forest department, an SIT or CBI probe into the alleged illegal change of land use, removal of encroachments, and punitive action against government officials.
However, the state government countered these claims by citing a joint land survey report conducted by the revenue and forest departments, which confirmed that the plot did not fall under any forest category. The forest department also formally conveyed that it had no objection to allocating the land for the Sainik Dham project.
The bench observed that once the competent forest authorities had declared the land as non-forest, the petitioner’s challenge became legally untenable. The court further noted that construction of the memorial has been underway since 2021 and is nearing completion, with the inauguration expected soon.
Refusing to interfere at this stage, the High Court dismissed the PIL, effectively clearing the way for the state’s war memorial project to proceed without further legal obstacles.
