Rivals of Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda have demanded a thorough investigation into the irregularities in land licensing as alleged by Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Ashok Khemka. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Indian National Lok Dal focused on the land deals of Congress president Sonia Gandhi's son-in-law Robert Vadra, some Congress party members have gone a step ahead and said there should be inquiry into all "change of land use" over the past eight years.
Rao Inderjit Singh, the Congress Lok Sabha member from Gurgaon, has demanded "a thorough probe" not only into the Vadra deal but all such deals.
Speaking to Business Standard, he said: "The case pertaining to Robert Vadra's land deal is related to a very small piece of land. During 2006-2012, around 21,000 acres of agricultural land were given to builders and institutions at throwaway prices and change in land use was also granted. There should be a thorough probe into these alleged transfers of land and the guilty should be punished."
Khemka in his submission had put the value of land licensing scam in Haryana to be anywhere between Rs 20,000 crore and Rs 3.5 lakh crore.
Taking the gains made by Vadra's firm Skylight Hospitality as the benchmark, Khemka had calculated the illegal gains per acre to be over Rs 15 crore and extrapolated this to all colony licences issued during the Hooda regime.
The Department of Town & Country Planning had issued various types of colony licences for a total of 21,366 acres during 2005-2012. The licences granted during this period constitute 71.5 per cent of the total area licensed from 1981 to 2012. The rate of granting colony licence from 2005 to 2012 was seven-and-a-half times that during 1981 to 2004. "Assuming an average market premium of Rs 15.78 crore per acre for colony licence as in the present case, we may be looking at a land-licensing scam of nearly Rs 3.5 lakh crore during the last eight years," Khemka had said.
The Department has termed the allegations "wrong" and "misleading".
"Even if the market premium for colony licence is assumed to be as low as Rs 1 crore per acre, the land-licensing scam in the last eight years is worth at least Rs 20,000 crore. The worth of the land-licensing scam in the last eight years could be any figure in the range between Rs 20,000 and Rs 3.5 lakh crore," said Khemka.
According to its balance sheet as at March 31, 2011, the total cost to Sky Light Hospitality Private Limited for purchase of land including stamp duty and commercial licence fees was Rs 15.38 crore. The net profit accruing to Sky Light Hospitality Private Limited due to the grant of commercial licence for 2.701 acres and the permission accorded by the department to sell the licence to DLF Universal was Rs 42.61 crore, the bureaucrat, who had initially cancelled the deal, alleged.
Khemka also alleged that this profit accrued to the company without any value addition. "Even if it is assumed that the premium for the commercial colony licence was not shared in other forms with other middlemen, which is unlikely, the market premium on commercial licence works out to a minimum of Rs 15.78 crore per acre."
