Pb & Har HC quashes allotment of 350-acre prime land to DLF

The Punjab and Haryana High Court has quashed the allotment of 350 acres of prime land in Gurgaon by Haryana government to realty firm DLF as it did not find the process "transparent, fair, just and reasonable".
The court had set aside the allotment of the land at Wazirabad by the state government on September 3, following a bunch of petitions filed by farmers and others challenging the acquisition and transfer of the land to the realty major.
"The allotment of acquired land in favour of M/s DLF...Is hereby disapproved being not transparent, fair, just and reasonable. It is held that the subject-allotment neither meets with the ingredients of 'public interest' nor it serves the public purpose of generating or maximising the state's revenue," said the court order.

A division bench of the court, comprising Justices Surya Kant and Amol Rattan Singh, had directed the Haryana government to appoint a project consultant for framing terms and conditions for inviting fresh international bids for the allotment of the land within one month.
The court in its verdict said if fresh bids invited from bidders fetch higher revenue to the state, then allotment of land to DLF would stand cancelled and amount received from DLF would be returned.
However, if fresh bids do not attract bid better than earlier bids given by DLF, the state government would be at liberty to revive the land allotment.

The court observed that appointment of IL & FS as consultant for the proposed recreational or leisure project was the stage from where the "paradigm shift" in favour of DLF took place.

"This stage, in fact, is where the 'paradigm shift' in favour of DLF took place, in our opinion, with M/s IL & FS being appointed as consultants without any open process but simply on a decision by the Board/Committee," the order said.
Initially, Haryana government had engaged the services of PGA Design Consultants Limited which had concluded in its report that the recreational/leisure project should "normally be undertaken in a private-public-partnership mode but could also be undertaken by the government or its agencies, if need be."

"...However, this report was over-shadowed and was supplemented by appointing M/s IL & FS as consultants, about three years later, who eventually recommended that the project be handed over to a private enterprise," the order said.
"The co-incidence of appointment of M/s IL & FS, which is a company admittedly involved along with DLF in various other projects, is too glaring to be ignored," the division bench observed.
Another factor highlighted by the court in its order was the transfer of huge chunk of land to the developer at a price "payable over a long period of eight years without factoring in (even with the interest payable on the principal) the normal increase in prices.