Surplus land worth crores goes abegging

Govt fails to take possession of 3.72cr sq m in Nagpur

NAGPUR: The Maharashtra government has failed to take possession of about 3.72 crore square metres of land, valued at thousands of crores of rupees, under the Urban Land Ceiling Act in the Nagpur agglomeration, says a committee headed by a former High Court judge. 

The Justice RK Batta committee, set up to probe allotments of surplus land under the ULC Act, blamed “the inaction of the competent authorities” for this. It also found violations in most allotments, especially those to political heavyweights.

Under section 10 (3) of the ULC Act the government is to identify surplus land and take possession of it. The committee found that the authorities concerned remained ‘lax’ in over eighty per cent of the surplus land cases. “Even where notification under section 10(5) of the Act has been issued, the authorities have not taken possession of the land for inexplicable reasons,” its report said.

The report, submitted to the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court last Tuesday, found “gross irregularities” in allotments of available surplus land to the institutions controlled by political heavyweights such as Maharashtra ministers Satish Chaturvedi, Anees Ahmed, former ministers Vinod Gudadhe Patil, Shivajirao Moghe, former Deputy Chief Minister Chhagan Bhujbal, north Nagpur MLA Nitin Raut, and former MLA Raje Satyawan Rao. The report found the surplus land was distributed to few, mostly to educational and social institutions controlled by politicians.  

The committee reproduced in its report a directive issued by the Housing Secretary on February 20, 2001, which asks the competent authorities to submit to the state government proposals of Anees Ahmed, Satish Chaturvedi, and Nitin Raut, for allotment of land found surplus under the ULC Act.

The authorities granted hundreds of exemptions in repossessing surplus land. This is allowed if the landowners undertake to build houses for the poor on the plots and give the government a share of the dwellings. This last condition was not enforced.

The Justice Batta committee did not spare the societies floated by senior IAS and IPS officers. In one such case, a society (Vidarbha Mulki Seva) is presided over by EZ Khobragade, a former Competent Authority under the ULC Act and currently the Collector of Wardha district.

The committee said maximum allotments were made on the recommendation of Nitin Gadkari, who was the guardian minister of Nagpur during 1995-99 in the Sena-BJP government. “However,” it observed, “the recommendations made by Gadkari and elected representatives were innocuous and routine in nature. The question is whether recommendations can be given any weight when allotment is to be made on the merit? There should be transparency in such matters.”

The report said: “In a majority of cases there has been no scrutiny whatsoever at the level of Competent Authority or sincere attempt to collect vital and relevant information required for taking decision whether land should be allotted and if so how much.”

What’s more, there was never any follow-up or monitoring of the schemes allowed on the surplus land exempted under the ULC Act. The report particularly castigated two senior officers – Khobragade and SG Gautam – for “not only violating the government circulars and resolutions, but also giving exemptions on the recommendations from the ministers and MLAs.”

In one its several crucial recommendations, the Bhatta committee suggested that district collectors should verify in every case, whether the land was used for the purpose for which it was granted an exemption or was allotted to an institution.