Use Adarsh building for housing war widows: CAG

The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) said it does not want to see Mumbai’s scam-tainted 31-storey Adarsh building demolished after terming the episode a case of “fence eating the crops.”

The report tabled in Maharashtra Assembly, on Friday, in Nagpur, noted that the government’s decision to bring down the skyscraper in south-Mumbai’s sea-side Colaba area as “hasty and inadequately considered.”

The CAG report instead advised that the government should take-over the building and use it for housing war-widows and deserving ex-servicemen and government employees. For the existing members who are at present in a state of limb, CAG suggested that the government compensate them for their possessions as per law.

However, CAG also caustically observed that the scam is a case in point of the dereliction of duty, lack of probity and accountability. “It needs to be very seriously investigated.”

The observation further states that the promoters of the society’s confidence of gaining the allotment of land is revealed by the fact that even before they were handed over the site on July 12, 2004, they had already sought an FSI (Floor Space Index) from municipal corporation's transport body-BEST which was using the adjacent plot.

It was a group of powerful elite who manipulated and fudged the records of a plot that was meant for the noble cause of welfare of war widows and ex-servicemen, the report remarked.

The Adarsh issue cropped up last year with allegations of violations of rules, forgery and manipulation of documents pertaining to the plot of land. Following an uproar, the state government initiated a CBI probe into the irregularities and also constituted a quasi-judicial commission to fix up the ownership of land.