Supreme Court Orders Kanwar Yatra Route Hotels, Stalls To Comply With Licensing; QR Code Mandate Deferred

The Supreme Court has directed all hotels and food stalls on the Kanwar Yatra route to fulfill licensing requirements.

Kanwar Yatra in Haridwar (PHOTO: IANS)

The Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered all restaurant and dhaba owners along the Kanwar Yatra route to strictly follow statutory licensing and registration criteria specified by the Uttar Pradesh government. The apex court, however, did not intervene at this stage in the controversy over a directive that mandates eateries to exhibit QR codes that disclose owners' identities.

"At this stage, all the concerned hotel owners shall abide by the requirement of license and registration certificate statutorily mandated. We make it amply clear that we're not venturing into the issues being contested. The application stands closed," the supreme court said in its order, as reported by ANI.

The controversial question of the QR code requirement, challenged by petitioners such as scholar Apoorvanand Jha, will be left for the moment unresolved. The bench explained that questions pertaining to the QR code and such would be heard in the main petition, which is pending before the Court.

In the past, the Uttar Pradesh government ordered restaurants along the Kanwar path to post QR codes with details of their owners. A similar notification was later ordered by the Uttarakhand government. The Supreme Court had last week sent notices to the two state governments on a plea questioning these orders.

The petition contends that these conditions infringe on citizens' basic rights and may invite discriminatory profiling, specifically targeting minority communities. Jha referred to a UP government press release on June 25, which he said reads: "The new steps require the exhibition of QR codes on every eatery along the Kanwar route, which disclose the owner's names and identities, hence achieving the identical discriminatory profiling which was earlier stayed by this court."

The petition also claimed that "vague and overbroad guidelines knowingly confuse the licensing conditions with the other illegal requirement of exhibiting religious identity, and leave room for violent enforcement of such a clearly arbitrary requirement both by vigilante groups and on-the-spot authorities." It raised the spectre of a "serious and immanent threat of irreparable harm to the constitutional rights of affected vendors, especially from minority communities," calling for the Court to step in urgently. Petitioners asked to limit such mandates to plain licensing standards and do away with vague orders calling for disclosures of identity.

The Supreme Court's interference on these lines is not new. A similar directive last year too was stayed by the top court. In its July 22, 2024, order, the Court had stayed the UP and Uttarakhand governments from implementing directives that mandated shopkeepers and hawkers on the Kanwar Yatra routes to put up their names as well as those of their employees. At that point in time, the Court had maintained that food vendors were required only to identify what they were selling to the Kanwarias, but not their individual identities.