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Court seeks land allotment details

JAIPUR: The Rajasthan High Court has asked the State Government and the Jaipur Development Authority (JDA) to make available to it all the documents related to allotment of land for the Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Trust, of which Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje was the chairperson.

Responding to a public interest petition filed by advocate Sushil Sharma, a division bench of the Court comprising Chief Justice Narain Rai and Justice R. M. Lodha gave a fortnight’s time to the respondents to present the relevant documents related to the allocation of 7693 sq. metres of land in the Residency area of Jaipur at five per cent of the then market rate.

At the day’s hearing a representative of the Chief Minister appeared in the court. On four previous occasions the Chief Minister had failed to represent herself in the court.

R. P. Agarwal represented the State Government.

In fact the trust, which had Home Minister G. C. Kataria and former BJP State president Bhanwarlal Sharma as members, give up the move on the land some time in December 2006 in the wake of a storm created over the issue by the opposition Congress. While the representatives of the Government and JDA made the plea that the issue no more existed after the trust’s decision to return the land, the Court accepted the plea from counsel for the complainant, S. R. Bajwa, that what all transpired in the deal should be made officially known.

The Court ordered that all the documents relating to the application, allocation and the cancellation along with any other relevant paper be made available on oath to it in two weeks.

The Congress leaders in 2006 had approached the then Governor Pratibha Patil seeking permission to prosecute Ms. Raje and her Cabinet colleagues in which they said was a land scam involving several crores.

The JDA, which issued an allocation letter back in July 2005, had carried out the actual allocation of the plot to the trust after the clearance from a Cabinet sub-committee in February 2006.

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