In Pratibha Patil's case, (residence) size matters

The President of India is entitled to a comfortable retirement home after her term is over. But does that mean spending Rs 8 crore of public money, pulling down two defence bungalows and grabbing 261,000 square feet of cantonment land? That’s what a group of ex-servicement are alleging, on the basis of an RTI request, in a story in MoneyLife that has gone viral on social media. The story has caught enough fire that the President’s office has been forced to respond calling it “malicious.” So what are the allegations? And how strong is the denial? Col. Suresh Patil (retd) and founder of Justice for Jawans, who procured the bungalow information lists out the allegations to journalist and RTI activist Vinita Deshmukh in the MoneyLife article. What is Pratibha Patil entitled to? According to the law, she can get a 2,000 sq feet bungalow in any part of the country if she wants the government to rent a home for her. Otherwise she can move into a government-owned Class V bungalow (about 4,500 sq feet) if one is available says Deshmukh. She also gets free electricity and water for life. [caption id=“attachment_275082” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Patil’s retirement home, a 4,500 sq feet bungalow, is being built on 261,000 sq feet of land in the Khadki Cantonment of Pune. Reuters”]  [/caption] What is Pratibha Patil building? She is building a 4,500 sq feet bungalow on 261,000 sq feet of land in the Khadki Cantonment of Pune. Two defence bungalows have been pulled down to make room for her bungalow. The MoneyLife article was headlined “President Patil grabs 261000 sq feet of land meant for soliders and officers.”  What is Rashtrapati Bhavan saying? There is no land grab happening. Ownership of both the land and the house will continue to remain vested with the government. “Therefore there is no substance in the allegation of personal gains,” said Archana Datta, OSD to the president. In this case, size matters. Datta took pains to say that the 2,000 sq feet living area specification is “only indicative and applicable where a suitable government residence is not available.” Her contention is that size limit does not apply in this case because “the president will be occupying a government accommodation.” She contends the president is entitled to a Type VII bungalow. What’s happening in Pune is merely “renovation.” MoneyLife prompty posted photographs of the “renovation” on its website to ask what kind of “renovation” is this which requires an entire bungalow to demolished. The bungalow was in good condition and not classified as Beyond Economic Repair (BER). Check out the photographs here. Also the money earmarked for this project is Rs 8 crore as per inside information from the Defence Estate Office according to Vinita Deshmukh. “Will the President of India’s office reply to this extravagance being extracted from the public treasury?” asks Deshmukh. It is perhaps unfair to complain that Patil is building herself a palatial bungalow in Pune on defence land even as jawans there do not have enough residential accommodation for their families. “Those jawans who decided to get their families to Pune nevertheless, live in slum-like conditions in one-room dwellings, near the Pune cantonment, with no drinking water facility,” writes Desmukh. Stung, the president’s office retorted that just because she has chosen to retire in the cantonment area does not mean she “is apathetic or indifferent to the welfare of soldiers.” That is true. It is not as if that land, or those bungalows, had been earmarked for jawans and their families and Patil is de facto evicting them. “We are saying that let her keep the 2,000 sq ft she is entitled to and give away the remaining land forconstructing official accommodation for soldiers and officers,” says Col. Patil. However the very specific allegations raised by MoneyLife remain unanswered. Why is a perfectly good bungalow being pulled down if it is just “renovation”? Why does the president need 261,000 sq feet of land for her 4500 sq feet bungalow? Does pulling down two bungalows to build another one constitute “occupying a government accommodation” just because it happens to be on government land? Can A1 Defence land be used for any purpose other than a strictly military one? Read all the questions raised by Deshmukh here. But this is the last thing the president needed coming as it does on the heels of another RTI request that shows she spent a whopping Rs 205 crores on foreign trips, surpassing the record of all her predecessors. Pratibha Patil might be low-key as a president, but she’s certainly proving to be  a high spender.