Yeddyurappa accused of sheltering land grabbers

At a time when Chief Minister Yeddyurappa is facing serious allegations of involvement in various land scams, Chairman of Task Force for Recovery of Public Land and its Protection V Balasubramanian  on Monday dropped a bombshell by alleging that the CM's office had been shielding land grabbers in the State.

Briefing media persons on the government land encroachment in the State, Balasubramanian said the chief minister’s Principal Secretary I S N Prasad in a letter dated November 19, 2010 had directed Chikkamagalur Deputy Commissioner that no “precipitative action” should be taken against any forest land encroachments. The letter stated that the order had been issued as per the directions from the chief minister.
“This implies that no action should be taken against encroachers. The officials in the district have taken shelter under the order and have not taken any action to remove encroachments. It is only courts that have powers to issue stay orders like this and not the Chief Minister’s office,” he said.

Balasubramanian said  the government had been till recently directing the Special Deputy Commissioner of Bangalore Urban district to issue certified copies of Official Memorandum (OM) of land grants to certain people flouting all rules. Most of the cases of bogus OMs are in Jala hobli of Bangalore north additional taluk, close to Bangalore international airport. “This is the mother of all scams. About 11,800 such files (of land grants), covering 25,000 acres of land worth about Rs 25,000 crores, have been found,” he stated.

The 20-month tenure of the Task Force, which was set up in September 2009, came to an end on Monday.  Headed by retired IAS officer Balasubramanian, the Task Force has submitted a 300-page report on government land encroachments  titled, “Greed and Connivance”. The report mentions the controversial order by the chief minister’s office. The Task Force has identified 12 lakh acres of government land encroachments in the State.

Chikkamagalur district has highest number of forest land encroachments in the State. About 35,000 acres of forest land has been encroached, mainly by coffee planters. Even forest land coming under Tiger reserve has been encroached.

Though the apex court had ordered that forest offence cases should be filed against 7,846 encroachers, orders in this regard have been issued  in only 1,193 cases. None of the encroachment cases has been so far removed by the government, he said. The Task Force has recommended to the government to order a CID probe into the issue as the existing revenue officers will not be able to make satisfactory enquiry into these large number of cases, he said.

Balasubramanian said several private companies had grabbed valuable government land in Bangalore in the name of setting up IT and BT parks.