Rithesh - 21 December, 2010 | Bangalore | governance | Corruption | Yeddyurappa | urban development | Media Reports | housing | BJP

Tehelka has done a excellent article (Once bitten, twice not shy) on how Yeddi is continuing his corrupt practices. It reports:

On 20 November, in the very week that Karnataka Chief Minister BS Yeddyurappa got a reprieve from the BJP party leadership, which allowed him to retain his throne if he cancelled controversial flat allotments to kith and kin, a Gazette notification quietly made it legal for ‘associate members’ to be admitted in employee housing societies . Nobody could have expected such a brazen move in contempt of court rulings at a time when the prime mover was himself the focus of the nation’s attention.

This article refers to how politicians are using housing societies to corner huge tracks of land in the city. Until sometime back it was a common practice for BDA to acquire/notify land for housing societies and hand it over to them for development of sites. These housing societies are usually formed by employees of public sector companies or employees of government departments (the most (in)famous of these being the judicial employees housing society). Law states that these societies cannot admit outside people into the society or allot sites to them.

Over period politicians have circumvented these rule and have bought sites in these societies for throw away prices. Like most land dealings in Bangalore, often these societies faced road blocks for development of sites - politicians and influential people steped in to resolve these issues in exchange for sites in the developed layouts. A lot of politicians mostly Congress and JD(s) ppl made money this way - some of them have been named in the report.

Recently this practice has been extended further - politicians have started asking for a bigger share than just sites - these include large tracks of land instead of just couple of sites. This obviously is against the law and multiple court rulings.

Tehelka report cites one example of the NTI society - this society was in procession of huge tracks of land in RMV 2nd Stage and around Sahakarnagar in Bangalore North. Due to farmer protests and involvement of local politicians this land got stuck in litigations and bureaucratic hurdles for more than a decade. Due to the long drawn court battle - the financial health of the soceity deteriorated. At some point an agreement was reached with the farmers to provide them with additional compensation as settlement.

To pay for this, some insiders proposed selling some land to builders - not surprisingly land in prime areas was chosen to be sold at cheap rates - all this with the involvement of some corrupt members of the society. Around 12 acers of prime land in RMV 2nd Stage of the society was sold of to Raheja group (for Pebble Bay project) at throw away prices a few years back. This was a clear violation of law and court rulings. 

Now our honorable CM Yeddiyurappa has gone one step ahead (may be to make up for the lost oppurtunities all these years) and made this practice a legal by passing a notification. Tehelka report clearly documents the societies which benefited from this change and how land from these societies were alloted to firms owned by members of his family.

Click here to view the full report.

PS: NTI society was a very large housing society in the 80s and 90s and they had a very good reputation. Their project near Sahakarnagar has close to 1000 sites - even larger than BDA layouts of those times. The vacant land of this society is now a prime location in North Bangalore. Original land owners (read people backed by politicians and builders) are now not happy with the proposed compensation plan and have gone to the Supreme Court for a better deal - which simply means that more people are eying this prime land.

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