Rajarhat New Town is now snowballing into a major political issue as Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Mamata Banerjee has indicated the pursuance of this as a build-up to the coming assembly election in West Bengal. So far, the opposition agitation is mostly restricted to the issue of forcible acquisition of land from the unwilling farmers.
Already, the state housing minister Gautam Deb, who is ex-officio chairman of HIDCO, has become embroiled in the issue as a series of allegations for irregularities and nepotism are now being hurled against him. Though he vehemently denies these charges, the CAG report gave a detail picture how the HIDCO, of which minister Deb is the chairman, had violated at almost every stage of land allottment.
The most glaring among them is how Deb used his “chairman's quota” and “special quota” and allotted plots. The management of HIDCO, as was shown earlier, acted in a manner resulting huge loss of revenue.
Yet, some members of the board including the managing director, director and officer on special duty to chairman and a number of other bureaucrats were allotted plots by HIDCO by creating a "special quota”. The minister defended this decision by saying on record that he had the right to give them land at his will.
Till 31 March 2009, altogether 147 plots were allotted under the special quota in addition to 292 plots under the chairman's quota. Under the special quota 57 plots were given to all India service officers (IAS-34, IPS-19, and IFS-4) including two directors of HIDCO as members. The minister defended the decision of allotting land to the IAS and IPS officers in return for “administrative help”.
Besides these, 25 plots were allotted to serving officers including state civil service officers, 13 plots to doctors/engineers/teachers and 12 plots to judges/advocates.
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Further, two director of HIDCO, as members of the committee recommended (November 2005) their own names for allotment of plots.
HIDCO neither framed any guidelines and rules for allotment nor did it issue any public notice for distribution of plots contrary to the opinion of Advocate General of Government of West Bengal that when public property is distributed, every citizen has right to compete and so public advertisement should be made.
The arbitrary way of disbursing plots was not restricted to the special quota and chairman's quota alone. Allotment through open lottery was corrupted with arbitrariness on behalf of HIDCO management. The HIDCO held lottery in phases and allotted 4982 individual housing plots and 3591 co-operative plots at predetermined prices to applicants of LIG/MIG/HIG through open lottery against a total applicants of 92,081.
To accommodate the unsuccessful applicants, HIDCO reserved 10 to 25 per cent plots of subsequent lotteries, provided they had kept the application money of the previous lottery with the HIDCO's bank.
“It was observed that 176 unsuccessful applicants in Action Area-I and Action Area-I/2 schemes were allowed in subsequent lotteries for Action Area-II and Action Area-II/2 even though they had already withdrawn application money from bank before the lottery.
Subsequently, the allotments were cancelled and these 'plots' were allotted under “special quota” without conducting any further lottery. In respect of three other lotteries, HIDCO did not reject 1129 applicants, although they did not deposit the requisite application money within the specified period.
Instead, it allowed them to deposit a part of requsite application money after a delay of three to five months, so as to enable them to participate in the lottery. Of these applicants, 137 were successful in the subsequent lottery.
The work in creating infrastructure is lagging far behind schedule in Rajarhat New Town. According to the project report (1999) 210 kilometres of internal roads were required to be constructed there.
Till March 2009, only 67 km was completed. As against the physical requirement of 44 lane km of internal roads to be constructed by 2003 for Action Area-I, only 28 km was completed. This delay in turn hindered the construction drainage and sewerage system.
Rajarhat New Town project is a government initiative to create dwelling place for at least 7 lakh people there. Most of the land was acquired there from small and poor peasants.
A number of water bodies, big and small, were filled in the process of developing the land. The arbitrariness of the managing committee of HIDCO not only caused huge revenue loss to public exchequer, it caused discriminated at every stages by favouring a few and denying others.
All these were done by flouting the existing rules.
Already the land scam in Mumbai has caused Ashok Chavan the Maharashtra chief minister's chair and another chief minister in Karnataka is embroiled in land scam. It is to be seen whether the CAG report on Rajarhat New Town project causes similar problem for the present chief minister of West Bengal.