Land given on lease to 16 influential people: Petitioner

The high court treated the letter, along with the newspaper cuttings, as a PIL and appointed a senior Nagpur-based lawyer, Anand Parchure, as amicus curiae. The PIL is still pending in the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court

In 2003, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) came out with strictures against the “illegal” allotments of land by the Nagpur Improvement Trust (NIT), pointing out 28 such cases. The local newspapers carried in-depth stories on this.

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One Anil Wadpalliwar, a social worker-cum-RTI activist, sent all the newspaper cuttings to the administrative judge of the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court in 2004, requesting him to treat it as a public interest litigation (PIL).

The high court treated the letter, along with the newspaper cuttings, as a PIL and appointed a senior Nagpur-based lawyer, Anand Parchure, as amicus curiae. The PIL is still pending in the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court.

Wadpalliwar, the petitioner, said that the court appointed a committee headed by Justice M N Gilani to investigate the case four years ago. The Gilani Committee later observed that there were violations and loss to the urban poor.

The NIT had acquired 42.88 acres of land owned by Shamjibhai Kheta on July 23, 1981. However, a cooperative society, Ujjwal Cooperative Housing Society, submitted an application to NIT, demanding regularisation of 52 plots, including the said land situated in Mouza Harpur, under the Gunthewari Act on May 17, 2002. NIT sent the application to the Nagpur municipal corporation (NMC) as the area was under its jurisdiction. The civic body rejected the application on August 22, 2002.

On December 20, 2010, the then NIT chairman rejected a second application of the society to regularise the said land. “Moreover, the said layout is also involved in my PIL,” said Wadpalliwar, who challenged the proposed regularisation of the said layout on the ground that the case was still pending.

The housing scheme for the poor had been proposed by NIT under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) on this land owned by it. The decision to give the land on lease to 16 influential people was bad in law, Wadpalliwar pointed out.