Court case(1985) 3 SCC 545

In 1981 the Maharashtra Government and the Bombay Municipal Corporation decided to evict pavement and slum dwellers and deport them to their places of origin. Section 314 of the Bombay Municipal Corporation Act, 1888 allowed the Commissioner to remove encroachments "without notice". Journalist Olga Tellis and the pavement dwellers, supported by the People's Union for Civil Liberties, petitioned under Article 32. They argued that they lived on pavements because their work was nearby, and eviction would take away their livelihood and therefore their life. Some dwellers had earlier given an undertaking in the High Court not to resist demolition.

Chandrachud CJ held that the right to life includes the right to livelihood, because no person can live without the means of living; to deprive a person of livelihood is to deprive him of life, and the Directive Principles in Articles 39(a) and 41 confirm this reading. Fundamental rights cannot be waived and no estoppel can arise against the Constitution, so the undertaking did not bar the petition. Section 314 was valid, but the discretion to act "without notice" must be exercised reasonably and in accordance with natural justice; a hearing should ordinarily be given, and in this case the Court itself had heard the petitioners. The Court directed that persons censused in 1976 be given alternative sites and that no eviction take place before the end of the monsoon.