Supreme Court Halts DDA’s ‘Deer Eviction Drive'

In a city that has rapidly traded trees for towers and green cover for concrete, the Deer Park in Hauz Khas remains one of the few oases where Delhi’s residents—human and otherwise—can breathe. But in a move that can only be described as bureaucratic blindness cloaked in the language of “relocation”, the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) seemed ready to quietly evict the remaining deer population from the park, pushing them out of their long-time home without so much as a habitat assessment or veterinary safeguard. The Supreme Court has now stepped in and drawn a firm line, restraining the DDA from shifting any more deer—for now.

The court’s intervention comes as a much-needed pause in what was beginning to look like an ecological and humanitarian farce: a government agency uprooting animals from their only known home under the vague pretext of policy, while failing to answer why the last vestiges of urban biodiversity must pay the price for Delhi’s planning failures. With natural habitats for wildlife already vanishing in the face of unchecked urban sprawl, the DDA’s attempt to displace a few hundred herbivores from one of the capital’s oldest parks reads less like governance and more like cruelty with paperwork.