“13. Considering the facts of the present cases, it is claimed, and the DDA does not contest, that all writ petitions, with one exception, were filed in well under a year from the date of knowledge of the allotment letter, and even in LPA 302/2013, the period was 1 year and 5 months. Such periods do not amount to such inordinate delay as to bar the petitioner's legal remedy under Article 226. In fact, all the applicants had applied under the NPRS, 1979, and all allotment-cum-demand letters were issued at least after a period of one decade (as in LPA 302/2013), or as is the norm, after approximately two decades in the other matters presently in appeal. Given such a delay in processing the applications, and subsequently, either sending the letter to the wrong address, or not to all available addresses, the equities do not demand that the petitioner's valuable rights to the allotted plots can be defeated, especially when the time lag between the knowledge of allotment and the filing of the writ petitions is not so long as to state that the petitioners were being indolent. Rather, each petitioner discovered the fact of the allotment letter through his/her own accord, and subsequently, within a reasonable period, approached this Court for relief under Article 226. In such cases, this Court is the opinion that its discretion to bar the claim on account of delay or laches, i.e. to say that the petitioners' were negligent in pursuing their legal remedies, is not merited, and thus, the orders of the learned Single Judges on this aspect are not liable to be interfered with. This court is conscious of the fact that given the span of over two decades, - sometimes even more than three decades for an application to "mature" into an allotment, it would be unreasonable for the Court to impute negligence or deliberate inaction, since the registrants cannot be expected to have a constant or permanent address. These registrants were not possessing flats or residential accommodation, which impelled them to apply DDA; it is too much to expect them to live more than 20-30 years in one place.”
