Allahabad High Court bills Noida officers Rs 5 lakh for an NSA detention

The Allahabad High Court has quashed the National Security Act detention of Delhi University graduate Akriti Chaudhary and ordered Rs 5 lakh in compensation, to be taken from the salaries of Gautam Buddha Nagar District Magistrate Medha Roopam and other officers “right down to the SHO.” The bench of Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Achal Sachdev said the detention order was passed without application of mind and that her continued incarceration under the NSA violated Article 21.

The detailed order was released on Monday, 7 September, after the court had quashed the detention on 2 September. The judges wrote that Roopam’s conduct was worthy of derision and that she had desired to make an example of the petitioner. They warned that repeated conduct of this kind could reduce Uttar Pradesh to what they called an Orwellian dystopia. Displeasure is to be entered in the service records of the district magistrate and the police officers who built the dossier.

The protest and the timeline

Chaudhary, a history graduate who also teaches children in slums, was arrested after a Noida industrial workers’ protest over wages in April 2026. Police lodged multiple FIRs and accused her of instigating violence and stone-pelting. The NSA was invoked on 13 May against Chaudhary and activist-journalist Satya Verma. The bench asked how she could be blamed for violence on 13 April when she had already been in police custody for two days.

Roopam is the daughter of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The court did not rest its findings on that fact. It rested them on the absence of material in the detention file. Preventive detention under the 1980 Act is supposed to rest on a live threat to public order, set out in writing. The judges found conjecture instead.

What the order does and does not do

The Rs 5 lakh is not to come from the state budget. It is to be recovered from the officials named. That is the part of the judgment that travels beyond a routine quashing. It attaches a personal cost to a preventive-detention file that the court treated as empty.

Chaudhary remains in judicial custody on the underlying criminal cases. Her bail applications have been rejected. The NSA order is gone. The FIRs are not. The court said that if the state machinery takes liberty on opinions and conjectures without evidence, courts will not remain mute spectators. The spectator line is the legal point. The salary recovery is the enforcement point. Both now sit on the record of the Gautam Buddha Nagar administration.