Report on land encroachment, reclaiming property in limbo

Question mark over its acceptance

Lawmakers of the State, it appears, are no more interested in giving effect to the V Balasubramanian report on reclaiming the encroached public property.

Law Minister T B Jayachandra on Friday gave a lengthy reply in the Assembly on the eviction of forest encroachers and illegal land encroachments in urban areas. However, he did not reply a pointed question by the Opposition: Whether or not the government has accepted the V Balasubramanian report? The members said that the report could be implemented only if the government had accepted it.

Y S V Datta (JDS), C T Ravi and Ashoka (both BJP) were keen to know whether the government had accepted the report. Ramesh Kumar (Congress) said that the report had not been placed before the Assembly or the Cabinet.

“Hence it is not an accepted document. Some retired officer who is sitting at home was asked to probe the matter. Can that be considered as an investigation report?” he wanted to know.

Minister Jayachandra merely said that in 2011, the then chief minister had chaired a meeting to take certain decisions on the report and the process of initiating action began later.
C T Ravi insisted that the government name the chief minister who had accepted the report, while Datta demanded that the minister explain whether the process of taking action as per the Balasubramanian report had been approved by the chief minister.
Former chief minister Jagadish Shettar and R Ashoka said that the Cabinet had not approved the report. But none of the members asked the government to accept the report or check the veracity of the facts mentioned in the report.

Finally, Jayachandra said that based on the report, two organisations have filed a public interest litigation in the High Court.

‘Spent own money for printing report’ 

Retired IAS officer V Balasubramanian said that he had to spend his money to get the report of the task force on public land encroachments printed. “I spent Rs 2.20 lakh from my pocket to print the copies of the task force. Nearly 2,000 copies were printed, both in English and Kannada. Each copy cost me Rs 110,” Subramanian said, when contacted by this newspaper.

 Balasubramanian, as chairman of the task force on land encroachments, began the probe in 2009 when B S Yeddyurappa was the chief minister. He had indicated that land worth Rs one lakh crore was encroached upon in and around Bengaluru. When contacted by this newspaper, the retired bureaucrat said, “In 2011, the then governor Bhardwaj had sought the action taken report from the government headed by D V Sadananda Gowda. The chief secretary had formed three committees headed by three additional chief secretaries to prepare report and follow up reports. But there was no follow-up later.”

Karunakara Reddy as revenue minister had said that he had rejected the report, while the present government has remained non-commital, Balasubramanian added.