Lifts for some, a lane for none

Author: Anil Kumar Mishra

Delhi’s lift policy was written to help the elderly climb, but it has quietly decided that one group of elderly residents does not count: the ones who live on the ground floor.

At Alaknanda in posh South Delhi two ground-floor flats sit at the end of a common passage. By the occupants’ own account, that passage was about eight feet wide before a lift shaft, cleared by a 2016 NOC, was built over it. What remains is roughly 3 to less than 3 feet. One of the owners is a senior citizen who moves with a walking stick or a wheelchair. At the funeral of a ground floor resident, the bier had to be tilted to get through that passage.

The objectors has been in court since 2016. They say, on record, that they do not oppose a lift. They oppose this location, and they have pointed to another one. In October 2026 a Court at Saket refused them interim protection for the second time, paving the way to quickly construct the lift before the appeal is even heard in Delhi High Court.

The case is a small one. The question it raises is not: when a policy lets the majority of a building decide, who protects the person the decision lands on?

What the policy says:

The rule is simple: If 50 per cent of the upper-floor owners sharing a staircase agree, a lift can be built, and the ground-floor owner’s consent is “advisable but not mandatory”. It all began after DDA approved a modified lift policy on 23 September 2015 and notified it on 7 January 2016. The municipal corporations adopted it; South MCD did so by Office Order of 13 May 2016.

The ground floor was written out on purpose. An earlier version made ground-floor consent mandatory. It was dropped because upper-floor residents complained that ground-floor owners, who gain nothing from a lift, would rarely agree. Unfortunately inspection is optional. The MCD scrutinizes drawings but only “reserves the right” to inspect the site, so approvals can rest on paper alone.

The policy does carry safeguards on paper: light and ventilation of habitable rooms must not be affected, and blind walls are preferred. But the person best placed to say whether those safeguards are being honored, the ground-floor occupant, has no vote.

The Delhi High Court has consistently backed the policy. In a 2019 ruling the High Court noted that the objecting ground-floor occupant “has no use for the lift” and upheld an NOC that had the consent of everyone else. (Deepak Sharma V DDA) In 2022, in a Kalkaji case, it held that ground-floor consent is “only advisory and not mandatory”. (Nehru Apartments) In Alaknanda case in 2018 the trial court refused an injunction, finding the remaining passage enough for a wheelchair and noting other access routes.The latest order added that the objectors’ real aim appeared to be no lift at all.

That last line deserves a pause. The objectors had said in writing that they want a lift, elsewhere. A court found otherwise at an interim stage, without a trial. It is a finding the objectors will now have to live down in their own building.

Nobody should argue against lifts for elderly people on the third floor. The need is real, and courts are right to take it seriously. The problem is that the policy treats “where” as settled the moment “whether” is settled.

A vote of upper-floor owners decides both. Those owners gain the lift and, often, a rise in resale value. The ground-floor owner bears the shaft, the shadow, the narrowed passage and the construction mess, and gets no vote on any of it. That is not a majority deciding; it is the beneficiaries deciding what the non-beneficiary must give up.

Three features turn this into a structural silencing rather than a hard bargain: Firstly, no vote, then no standing. Because consent is “advisory”, an objection carries no formal weight at the NOC stage. By the time the objector reaches court, the structure is up, and the court weighs years of delay against them.

Secondly delay is counted against the objector. In Alaknanda the ten-year wait was cited as a reason to deny relief. But the objectors went to court simultaneously the NOC was issued. The decade is the length of litigation and nth rounds of failed mediations, not the length of their obstruction.

And thirdly the burden of proof runs one way. Upper floors need paper approvals. The ground floor must prove, with measurements and photographs, that a 3-foot passage is unsafe, and that an alternative site is feasible, often without access to the engineering data the applicants hold.

Age does not stop at the first floor. A ground-floor resident in a wheelchair is as much the person the policy was meant to protect as a third-floor resident on a walking stick. A policy that sees only one of them is not about accessibility. It is about whose accessibility counts.

Alaknanda is not an isolated case. Lift disputes running five to ten years are common across Delhi’s DDA and group-housing blocks, and they stall in both directions. Now, Neighbors go to war over placement of lift in addition to fights on parking spots.

Two patterns stand out. First, whoever controls the managing committee tends to control the outcome: in Yamuna Apartments a committee blocked a lift with six of eight owners in favor, while in Cosy Apartments a new committee pushed lifts through over objections. Second, the people the fight is supposed to be about often lose either way: in Vasant Kunj, the elderly woman for whom a lift was sought died before it was ever usable.

What the record does not show is a pattern tied to any particular kind of resident, including well-known ones. The duration of these disputes is better explained by the policy’s design (no forum for objections before construction, no deadline, discretionary inspections) than by the personalities involved, even where personalities clearly make it worse.

What a fairer policy would look like: The fix is not to restore a ground-floor veto; it is to give the ground floor a hearing before the concrete is poured.

Let the 50 per cent upper-floor majority decide whether a lift comes. Let the location be decided by the MCD after hearing every affected owner, ground floor included.

Then a mandatory site inspection should be in place. Replace “reserves the right” with a compulsory inspection and a written report on passage width, light, ventilation, utilities and emergency access, shared with all owners.

There has to be a minimum clear passage. Fix a floor below which no lift may narrow access to any flat, measured with wheelchairs and stretchers in mind, not doorways.

Then a time-bound objection window. Thirty days to object after the NOC application, a decision within sixty, and no construction until it is decided. That ends both decade-long stalls and build-first-argue-later.

Further, alternatives should assessed on cost and feasibility, in writing.If an objector proposes another site, the MCD should record why it is or is not viable, so courts are not left to guess at the interim stage.

And lastly Compensate where harm is unavoidable. If a lift must take light or space from a ground-floor flat, the beneficiaries should pay for it, as they would for any easement. None of this slows a fair lift down. It only slows down an unfair one.

Policies are written in office orders. They are lived out in stairwells. Picture the passage outside a ground-floor flat in an old DDA block. The shaft is already up, grey and unfinished, and the gap beside it is just wide enough for one person at a time. An elderly woman’s wheelchair waits inside the door. Her objectors has been told, by notice and by order, that the lift will be finished.

Five residents stand in the narrowed lane. None holds any office the policy recognizes, but between them they have the signatures, the committee and, now, a court order. The ground-floor owner tries once more: the passage, the ambulance, the funeral, the other site.

One of them shrugs, and says what the policy has been saying all along, only more honestly: “Stay lao agar problem hai toh.” Bring a stay, if you have a problem.

That sentence is the whole design of Delhi’s lift policy in five words. The majority builds. The minority litigates. And the burden of proving that a home has been made smaller falls on the one person who never got a vote.