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63. Alternatively, the State Government itself can issue rules under Section 353-A.

64. There is also one more possibility. The Chennai City Police Act mandates, under Section 34(1), that no enclosed place or building, having an area of 46 1/2 sq.meter or upwards, shall be used for public entertainment or resort without a licence from the Commissioner. The word 'resort' is not defined in the Act. Under Section 35 of the same Act, no enclosed place or building shall be used as an eating house, coffee house, boarding house, lodging house, hotel, gymnasium or fencing school without a licence from the Commissioner. Section 39 of the Act empowers even the Commissioner to make rules for ensuring order and decency and for the public safety at all places of public entertainment or resort. It reads as follows :

Power to make rules:- The Commissioner may make rules for ensuring order and decency and for the public safety at all places of public entertainment or resort, and for regulating the times during which the places referred to in sections 34 and 35 shall be allowed to be open or used, and from time to time may rescind or alter such rules; and in case of breach of any such rules or of the conditions of the licence granted under section 36, may order such places to be closed, and while such order is in force such places so ordered to be closed shall be deemed to be unlicensed places."

65. Section 52 of the Chennai City Police Act empowers the Commissioner to order the owner or the tenant of a house, to discontinue to use the house as a lodging house for prostitutes or as a brothel, if he has reason to believe that the house is used as such. In any case, Section 78 of the Chennai City Police Act empowers the State Government to make by-laws consistent with the Act for more effectively carrying out the objects thereof and for the preservation of order. The word 'order' would include public order, decency and morality.

(ii) In specific cases where the police have reasonable grounds to believe that an offence punishable under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act has been or is being committed, it is open to the police to take action, after scrupulously following all the steps indicated in Section 15 of the said Act. The steps to be followed are narrated by me in paragraph 28 above; and
(iii) Based upon the laws enacted in various States of the United States of America and Singapore, which I have dealt with in paragraphs 39 to 54, the respondents may take appropriate steps for bringing in either a new legislation or a subordinate legislation in terms of the provisions of the Chennai City Municipal Corporation Act or the Chennai City Police Act, so that public order, decency and morality, which can form the basis for a regulatory law under Article 19(2) of The Constitution, are taken care of. The Government shall file a report on or before 31.3.2015, before this Court, about the decision taken. No costs. Consequently, all connected pending MPs are closed.