All about the Act

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This Blog is written by Oshin Suryawanshi from Amity Law School, Noida. Edited by Karan Dutt.

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INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS RENT CONTROL?

The practice of imposing a legal maximum (rent ceiling) upon the rent during a particular housing market, below the equilibrium rent is named rent control. But if the rent is about at A level below the equilibrium rent, it’ll necessarily cause a situation of excess demand or shortage. During a free market, prices (here, rents) would rise automatically filling the gap between the demand and therefore the supply. But rent controls prevent prices from rising up to the equilibrium level and thus, alternative rationing mechanisms like black and uncontrolled markets evolve.

Murphy’s law of policy states that “Economists have the smallest amount influence on policy where they know the foremost and
are most agreed; they need the foremost influence on policy where they know the smallest amount and disagree most vehemently”. Also, the sheer diversity of rent control laws existing in various states and countries, including phenomenal economic diversity makes it very difficult to generalize the argument across borders, and thus makes the task of policy makers that far more difficult.

HOW DID IT ORIGINATE?

The rent control was introduced in the early 1990s in US and some other part of the world to check rent increase in tenant election during wartime housing emergency. After World War II these a sudden increase in the demand for table housing from soldier returning home to prevent rain rising too much owing to the SPURT in demand, rent control act in the bank in the bracket RCA under various names were introduced in many countries. These were called the first-generation rent control those introduced later were called a second-generation rent control or soft rent control.

THE LEGAL ASPECT OF RENT CONTROL

Under the Indian Constitution, housing provision of is a state subject. Does the enactment and enforcement of rent control laws is the responsible to the individual state while this is accordance with the federal nature of the Indian Republic or the policies it makes a comprehensive analysis of the rent control law that much more difficult. The common thread running through almost all the rent control acts on the station is that they are intended to serve two purposes:

1. To protect the tenant from evictions from the house while he is living except for defining reason and on demand condition and;

2. To protect him from having to pay more than a fare or a standard fare.

The Biometric copies collected by Government may construct several other problems like not matching fingerprints or non-recognition of iris scans. Such failure of technology will certainly give citizens the reasons to blame the authority because the authority is one relying completely upon it. There would always be a possibility of a false match of biometrics or no match at all. Even scientists and expects agree on this.

Over the last years, there have been multi fold instances of data leaking online even from the governmental websites. One of the case which was when an RTI application pushed the UIDAI to disclose the fact for about 210 government websites made personal details of people reveal publically on the internet with their Aadhaar. This report revealed that personal information was removed from all websites, but it also did not inform about the timings of the data leak. The issue was so excessive that even a simple google search revealed many databases along with their demographic data including their Aadhaar card numbers, their names, names of parents, mobile number, PAN number, religion, body marks, the status of rejection of applications, IFSC codes, bank account numbers, and many other sensitive information.^[1]

ANALYSIS OF “UTTAR PRADESH, URBAN BUILDINGS (REGULATION OF LETTING, RENT AND EVICTION) ACT, 1972”

 The article does not directly address refugees & applies only to in-country ‘legally’ aliens. Hence the article’s application is very restricted. It is relevant, however, in that it defines what should be done before someone can be forcefully expelled. “Article 7 of the ICCPR” is also important, as it safeguards against torture. The “Human Rights Committee” has considered this clause when considering deportation.

From the view-point of  the Country, we will illustrate some of the main difficulty faced by the existing non-refoulement policy, both from the point of view of the refugees & the Country. For the motive of this research, it is helpful to separate country practice into 2 groups ; the 1^st describes how countries respond to mass influxes of refugees, while the 2^nd looks daily at the procedures for deciding individual countries. I’m not going to look at every country, I’m going to look at some cases that have posed important concerns for the refugee legislation.

Through our study of country law, we have found that there are several cases where the non-refoulement concept is infringed, or at least threatened. So basically, does this mean that countries no longer abide by the non-refoulement concept? Is there been such a drastic shift in attitude towards asylum seekers that one of the core values of refugee law has become redundant? Even if it is the situation portrayed by preceding sentence, I would like to contend here that this is not the case. Increasingly, the concept of non-refoulement is infringed but  violation alone does not strip it of its international law character. However, the manner in which the above-mentioned countries treated the concept shows that it has the  international practice. More importantly, what is evident from the above examples is that the conditions of its applicability have to be specified in order to be of practical benefit to the theory.

Lawyers have tremendous responsibility for the administration of justice; yet they refuse to accept moral accountability for their actions. In Freedman’s view, a moral understanding of the lawyer’s role requires zealous representation, moral counseling, and moral evaluation of whether to represent a client. He describes lawyers as having personal moral responsibility for their decision to represent a client.  But contrary has been seen in Indian context in most of the criminal cases are delay because of the lawyers as they demand for adjournments without any specific reason. It also happens many a time they get the benefit the adjournments and destroy the proof and change the victim. The problem faced by the prosecutor in speedy trial is either they are able to prepare arguments properly or they are not heard. Secondly, the number of lawyers in proportion to cases is low. All these lead to inefficient justice system. Kumar and Krishnan said, “The problem of delays by lawyers underscores the need for reforms in legal education as well as raising the quality of legal profession. The data released by the SC demonstrates that delays are indeed a reality and their causes are multifold, but a good part of the burden needs to be taken by the lawyers.”

REFERENCES

[1] https://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/aadhaar-security-breaches-here-are-the-major-untoward-incidents-that-have-happened-with-aadhaar-and-what-was-actually-affected-4300349.html