SHILLONG – A compensation dispute over a school damaged during construction of the Shillong-Dawki Road has reached the Meghalaya High Court, with the court ordering a fresh joint inspection after NHIDCL challenged the PWD’s reconstruction estimate as excessive.
The division bench of Chief Justice Revati Mohite Dere and Justice W Diengdoh directed the National Highways & Infrastructure Development Corporation Limited (NHIDCL), Public Works Department and Deputy Commissioner of East Khasi Hills to jointly inspect the affected school and establish which structures were actually damaged by the road construction.
The order came during the hearing of a PIL on Monday after Deputy Solicitor General of India Dr N Mozika, appearing for NHIDCL, disputed the amount assessed by the PWD for reconstruction. Mozika told the court that the estimate was exorbitant and included portions of the school that, according to NHIDCL, had not been damaged by the Shillong-Dawki Road project.
The court therefore directed a senior NHIDCL representative, senior PWD officers and the East Khasi Hills Deputy Commissioner to conduct the inspection and prepare a fresh assessment based only on damage attributable to the road construction.
The bench made the scope of NHIDCL’s liability explicit, stating that the corporation would be concerned only with the construction of buildings or structures damaged during the Shillong-Dawki Road works. Structures unaffected by the project are not to be included in the reconstruction estimate.
Mozika told the court that once the amount is freshly assessed, NHIDCL would deposit the quantified compensation with the concerned beneficiaries to facilitate reconstruction of the damaged structures.
The dispute over the estimate was not the only issue before the court. Mozika also submitted a report on behalf of NHIDCL along with a preliminary report prepared by IIT Guwahati titled “Vulnerability Assessment of Slopes along Shillong to Dawki Road up to Bangladesh Border including Dawki Bridge.”
The IIT report is a preliminary vulnerability assessment and contains an indication of the timeframe for the Shillong-Dawki Road to become fully functional.
The court directed Mozika to file a short affidavit from NHIDCL specifying how much time would be required to complete the detailed vulnerability assessment.
The court’s intervention puts the reconstruction dispute on a narrower footing: NHIDCL must account for damage caused by the road project, but the project cannot be made responsible for unrelated structures simply because they appear in a larger reconstruction estimate.
The school’s compensation will now depend on what the joint inspection establishes, while the wider safety assessment of the Shillong-Dawki corridor remains incomplete. The court has settled one point for now: the bill must follow the damage, not the other way around.
