The governments concerned must clear the mess before proceeding with further construction. They should not add to submergence and displacement before clearing the backlog fully. The ringing words, "let right be done,' famous in English legal history, reverberated in the rich and powerful voice of the actor Robert Donat through the 1950 film Winslow Boy, and they have remained ever since in memory. Sitting in the Supreme Court on March 10 during the latest in a long series of hearings on the Narmada (failure of rehabilitation) case, I strained my ears to detect those resounding words in the air. But I could hear them only faintly and with some difficulty. The court was of course very impressive and awe-inspiring, and one was proud to be in India's highest court. However, there was a nagging disappointment, a vague sense that something was amiss. I shall not try to put that inchoate sense into words. Continuing story of failure What was before the court was the continuing story of failure on the rehabilitation front in the Narmada Valley. The petitioners were drawing attention to the lag in rehabilitation even with reference to an earlier height of the dam; the indefensibility of adding to the displacement numbers without clearing the backlog; the illegality (in their view) of the so-called Special Rehabilitation Package or SRP (that is, cash instead of land); the duress under which the Project-Affected Families (PAFs) were asked to choose between uncultivable, unirrigable land from the government's land bank and cash under the SRP; the perversion of even that scheme by corruption and fake registries; the duping of the tribal people, and so on. The plea was for justice and for fundamental rights under Article 21. On an earlier occasion, on July 8, 2006, the Prime Minister had in all good faith proceeded on the basis that the Shunglu Committee's Report on the status of rehabilitation was factually correct, and that whatever lag that remained could be cleared during the three months when project work would remain suspended because of the monsoon. He must have been so briefed, but unfortunately that briefing turned out to have been erroneous. It soon became clear that the Shunglu Committee's Report was badly flawed and contained a few truths but also many errors. As for the lag in rehabilitation, far from being cleared in three months it still remains (and has perhaps increased) two years later. No one can now state with a straight face that the rehabilitation has been completed. It might be argued that there are two views here