Chandigarh, Nov. 28 -- Thirty-two years after his two houses collapsed due to leakage of water from a pipeline installed by the public health department, the Punjab and Haryana high court upheld a lower court's decision to award Rs.2 lakh compensation to a Sonepat resident.

"The negligence of the defendants is based on tangible evidence such as site plan, witness statements, and the admitted failure of authorities to act on repeated complaints. Both courts found the chain of causation between leakage and structural deterioration duly established," the bench of justice Deepak Gupta observed while dismissing an appeal filed against lower court orders in 2001 by the Haryana government.

As per the case, Balbir Singh had two houses in Bichpa...