CHENNAI: A bid to save a ‘heritage structure’ from being pulled down to pave the way for the Metro Rail boomeranged on the Indian National Trust for Architectural and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and its Chennai convenor Sriram Venkatakrishnan, as the Madras High Court found the writ petition, seeking to restrain the demolition of P Orr & Sons building, to be a ‘vexatious litigation’.A division bench comprising Justices Elipe Dharma Rao and M Venugopal imposed a cost of Rs 5 lakh on INTACH, which is to be paid to the TN State Legal Services Authority within four weeks, and directed the State government to remove Sriram from the Heritage Conservation Committee and such other committees within two weeks. The Bench said that the petitioner, Sriram, who is a member of the Committee, had permitted the CMRL to go on with the project and then illegally challenge the decision by posing as the tenant of the building. It pointed out that the original owner, Associated Publishers, had no objection to the acquisition proceedings and had submitted itself to the same. Sriram had indulged in professional misconduct and unnecessarily stalled a public project, the bench observed.
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