Odisha: How land grab became a fine art under the Naveen regime

Bhubaneswar: When the Naveen Patnaik government orders an inquiry by the state crime branch or the vigilance into something, you know for sure that it does not want the truth in the matter to come out. The record of these two agencies in a host of scams, including the multi-thousand crore mining and chit fund scams, and a spate of political murders leave no room for doubt on that score. So, it came as no surprise when the chief minister on Thursday ordered yet another inquiry by the discredited crime branch into the illegal acquisition of over 100 acres of land (the government has admitted to only 76 acres though) on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar by leaders of his own party, including an incumbent and a former minister, and select bureaucrats. For good measure, the government also announced the suspension of a sub registrar, a tehsildar and an additional tehsildar for illegally registering the leased land ‘in violation of the lease conditions’ and even allowing the mutation of the land on the basis of sale transactions that are ‘ab initio void’. While announcing the suspension of these low level revenue officials, however, the notification cleverly leaves out any mention of who the beneficiaries of these fraudulent transactions are. But much as the government would like to keep things under the wraps, at least one big name is out in the open: that of Kalpataru Das, Rajya Sabha MP and former minister, who has had a meteoric rise since the fall from grace of Naveen Patnaik’s erstwhile mentor Pyari Mohan Mohapatra. The Gokarneswar Charitable Trust managed by his family has acquired three acres in the area while his son Pranab Balabantaray has had two acres more registered in his name and the latter has admitted as much. But the people of Ghangapatna, where the land grab has taken place, swear that the family is in effective possession of at least 50 acres of land in the area, at least part of which is forest land. The sheer audacity of the take-over has surprised many. Not content with illegally acquiring the land, Das, when he was minister for Panchayati Raj, sanctioned an amount of Rs 5 lakh under the MGNREGS for construction of a 1.3 km stretch of road on a piece of land that has been categorised as ‘small forest’ and thus required the permission of the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF). He even got a boundary wall constructed around the land acquired by him. [caption id=“attachment_1543493” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik. PTI[/caption] The land in Ghangapatna is only the latest in the series of acquisitions that Das has managed over the years. At last count, he had acquired an incredible 41 land plots and houses at various places in the state and outside, eight of them in Bhubaneswar and one in New Delhi. After the CAG report blew the lid off some of his acquisition, an embarrassed Pranab had to return to the government two flats he had acquired under the discretionary quota. Revelations made by the CAG and the media in the last one month or so suggest that the provision of the much maligned ‘discretionary quota’ has been used effectively as a licence to acquire property in prime locations in the Twin City of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack at throwaway prices by the powers that be. Kalpataru Das is only the most visible symbol of the gross abuse of the provision, but he is certainly not the only beneficiary. Revenue Minister Bijayshree Routray has usurped a huge plot of land given to his wife Jyoti in the heart of the capital city for setting up a hospital. Agriculture Minister Pradip Maharathy has availed of a house from the State Housing Board despite having an ancestral house in the city, a gross violation of the rules governing the discretionary quota. Not content with this, he acquired a piece of government land contiguous to his house, which is bigger in size than the one on which his allotted house stands. Last year, Forest and Environment Minister Bikram Keshari Arukh (who was then the Rural Development minister) had to return one of the two houses he had acquired under the much maligned quota. The list is only illustrative and by no means exhaustive. Taking the cue from the politicians, bureaucrats too have made merry at the expense of the deserving people in availing land or houses under the discretionary quota. An RTI query has found that 14 IAS officers have acquired more than one house in the Twin City under the quota in gross violation of the rules. No wonder the Naveen government, despite a 2002 directive of the Odisha High Court and repeated, almost yearly raps on the knuckle by the CAG, has refused to frame clear, unambiguous guidelines for allotments under the discretionary quota. The court has also suggested that the government could, till the norms are in place, go by the guidelines prescribed by the Supreme Court in the allocation of petrol pumps. But loathe to losing the discretion to bestow favours on its own, the government has ignored this suggestion too. Finding itself on a sticky wicket after a series of revelations about the gross abuse of the provision of discretionary quota, the state government formed a Task Force to go into all such allotments since 1995. But given the fate of the many such inquiries in the past, nobody believes that anything would come out of it. Misuse of the discretionary quota took place even in earlier governments. But in Naveen’s regime, it has been made into a fine art.