IANS/Chandigarh
A senior bureaucrat, who hit the headlines last year after he questioned a land deal involving Congress chief Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra, has alleged a land-licencing scam in Haryana to the tune of a whopping Rs3.5tn during the regime of Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
Indian Administrative Service officer Ashok Khemka has alleged that the scam of this magnitude has taken place in the past eight years - 2005 to 2012.
Khemka cancelled a Rs580mn land deal between Vadra’s company, Sky Light Hospitality and realty giant DLF in October last year, and was punitively shifted out by the state government.
He has alleged that that the deal done by Vadra in the purchase, getting licence and sale of prime land, measuring 2.7 acres, in Shikohpur village in Gurgaon district was based on “false” documents, including a fictitious cheque, and was a “sham sale.”
Disputing the charge that he had singled out Vadra’s land deal for cancellation, Khemka said: “As director general (of land holdings and consolidation), I had investigated many land cases. This (Vadra) case got more media attention because of the high profile people involved.”
Allegations have been levelled by Khemka with a number of examples of fishy land deals and land-grabbing involving VIPs, influential bureaucrats and realty giants in the national capital region (NCR) in Haryana adjoining New Delhi and other parts of Haryana.
Khemka made the allegations in his reply to the Haryana government on the findings of a three-member committee of top bureaucrats set up by the Hooda government October last year on issues raised by the officer.
The high-level committee had recently rubbished the issues raised by Khemka. The 1991-batch IAS officer filed his reply on May 21 this year and the Haryana government says that it was still “being examined.”
Khemka has alleged the huge land scam involving issuing licences to colonies in over 21,366 acres of prime land in Haryana between 2005 and 2012. Hooda, who is into his second term as chief minister, has been in power in Haryana since March 2005.
“The Department of Town & Country Planning issued various types of colony licences for a total of 21,366 acres in the last eight years from 2005 to 2012. The licences granted from the year 2005 to 2012 constitute 71.5% of the total area licensed from 1981 to 2012,” Khemka claimed in his reply.
“The rate of grant of colony licence during the period from 2005 to 2012 was seven-and-a-half times the corresponding rate during the period from 1981 to 2004. Assuming an average market premium of Rs15.78 crore per acre for colony licence as in the present (Vadra) case, we may be looking at a land-licensing scam of nearly Rs3.5 lakh crore during the last eight years,” he said.
“Even if the market premium for colony licence is assumed to be as low as one crore rupees per acre, the land-licensing scam in the last eight years is worth at least Rs20,000 crore. The worth of the land-licensing scam in the last eight years could be any figure in the range between Rs20,000 and 350,000 crore,” he said.
“This is a humongous scam and loot of public wealth by the vested political-bureaucratic-business nexus,” Khemka said in his letter.
Pointing out that Vadra’s land deal with DLF was a clear cut case of impropriety as Vadra bought the land for Rs70.5mn, procured a licence for a colony from the Hooda government and sold off the same land to DLF for Rs580mn, Khemka alleged that Vadra’s company made over Rs420mn from the deal.