‘BDA is removing eyes of one to give sight to other’

‘BDA is removing eyes of one to give sight to other’
Deccan Herald

The Court held that the acquiring land for layout was not in public interest as many people were stripped of land and were paid meagre compensation.

The Karnataka High Court on Friday described that the Bangalore Development Authority’s scheme of allotting sites to landless people by forming Arkavathy Layout as “robbing the Peter to pay Paul” and held that the scheme would help only the rich people.

While declaring as illegal the land acquired for formation of the layout, the Court has observed that the scheme would help the affordable class of people who sell the BDA sites for higher prices soon after the allotment, which comes with absolute ownership title.

Describing the plight of the people, whose lands were acquired for the formation of the layout, as deplorable, Justice V Gopala Gowda has said that the BDA has never considered the problems to be faced by these land owners after their displacement from their land.

“In the guise of providing shelter to siteless or houseless persons, the owners of immovable properties are made landless and also jobless. They are compelled to go in search of alternative land at far off places forgetting their born and grown up places to start altogether a new life in a different environment”, the judge observed.

The act of the BDA in depriving the ownership rights of original land owners and bestowing ownership on the allottees of sites is nothing but removing the eyes of a person and donating the same to a blind person. In the process, the blind would get vision whereas the donor would become blind and hence this process cannot be construed to be in public interest, the court held.

The Court further observed that if a person living in a place for generations is stripped of everything except payment of some meagre compensation, one can imagine the mental torture they will undergo thinking about future of their family, job, etc.

Forgetting all these factors, the BDA boasts of “public purpose” totally forgetting the negligence shown to towards the real owners of the land who lost their immovable property which they had protected for years, the court said.

BDA MAY APPEAL

Bangalore, dhns: Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) is planning to appeal against the single-judge bench High Court judgement which quashed the land acquisition process under Arkavathy layout project.

“In all probability BDA will appeal to a larger bench. We cannot back out of the project at this stage. Moreover, the project involves hard-earned money of thousands of people,” a top BDA official told Deccan Herald on Friday.

However, the final decision will be taken by Chief Minister N Dharam Singh, who also holds Bangalore City development portfolio. In fact, Mr Singh is learnt to have instructed BDA Commissioner M N Vidyashankar over phone from Delhi to study the grounds on which the Court has taken the decision. When contacted, Mr Vidyashankar said he will react after only studying the copy of judgement. “There are a lot of issues involved in the judgement order. We will able to take any decision only after carefully studying the order,” he added.

Work suffers

Work on Arkavathy layout formation, which came to a grinding halt in mid-January, 2005, continued to suffer after the High Court judgement. So far, BDA has formed around 3,000 sites against the promised 20,000 sites for distribution among the successful applicants.