Amar: Land woes

Lucknow, Sept. 27: The Mayavati government is thinking of filing an FIR against Amar Singh and seven IAS officers after a probe found that they allotted plots in an upscale Lucknow enclave out of turn and cheap.

R.K. Mishra, the special secretary in the home department, said the report on irregularities in the allotment was being examined. “We are consulting the law department. The FIRs may be drawn up any day now.”

The probe was carried out by a committee headed by IAS officer Vijay Shankar Pandey, the Lucknow divisional commissioner who had once led a pressure group to combat corruption among his colleagues.

The scam occurred between 2004 and 2006, during Mulayam Singh Yadav’s tenure. Amar Singh, the Uttar Pradesh Development Council chairman during this period, was one of the beneficiaries of the illegal allotments.

The panel recommended the cancellation of 28 allotments, in Lucknow’s Gomti Nagar area, to politicians, bureaucrats and their relatives, saying these robbed the government of Rs 2.30 crore in revenues. It also recommended cases against those who got the plots.

The land cost was cut from Rs 4,000 a square metre, the official rate, to Rs 3,000, the report said. As a result, the registration and other charges, linked to the value of the land and which flow to the government, also fell.

The report was submitted on Wednesday, a day after Akhand Pratap Singh, the former state chief secretary accused of corruption, was arrested by the CBI in Delhi. He, too, had served when Mulayam was chief minister.

The decision to set up the panel was seen as part of Mayavati’s campaign against corrupt officers and scams of the Mulayam government. But the former chief minister has accused the current government of trying to “demoralise senior and efficient officers” of his regime.

Housing secretary K.L. Meena and Lucknow Development Authority vice-chairman B.B. Singh are among the IAS officers indicted in Pandey’s report.

The accused officials have said they would prove their innocence in court.