Chandigarh: The Punjab Vigilance Bureau has booked the wife of IAS officer Rajesh Dhiman in an alleged multi-crore guava orchard compensation scam.
According to the FIR lodged at Mohali on Saturday, Dhiman’s wife Jasmeen Kaur is one of the 18 accused in the case who allegedly got crores of rupees from the government as compensation — based on fraudulent documents — for acquisition of guava orchards in Mohali’s Bakarpur village.
Total compensation received by the accused is over Rs 86 crore while Dhiman’s wife got Rs 1.17 crore as compensation, the FIR states.
Dhiman, who got promoted from Provincial Civil Services to Indian Administrative Service some years ago, is currently posted as the Ferozepur deputy commissioner.
He rubbished the charges, saying that the purchase of land by his wife was a bonafide transaction, independent of his position in the government.
Among the accused are three officials of the horticulture department, including a retired deputy director and the then patwari of Bakarpur. Seven accused, including a property dealer, were arrested, vigilance officials said.
The FIR, a copy which is with ThePrint, states that Dhiman was posted at a senior position (additional chief administrator) at the Greater Mohali Area Development Authority, Mohali when the process of land acquisition by GMADA was underway since 2016. The accused also had contacts among senior officers posted at the GMADA.
The accused, the FIR states, gathered prior information about the impending acquisition from these officers, including Dhiman, and purchased the land under acquisition.
Dhiman said that he was posted at GMADA in 2018 and information about the acquisition of land in the area was an open secret. “In 2017, the then housing minister in fact announced an upcoming housing project in the area, and everybody knew that the land in that area would soon be acquired,” Dhiman told ThePrint Saturday.
The FIR states that despite the fact that notification under Section 11 of the Land Acquisition Act was already issued, the accused purchased the land illegally to qualify for a compensation from the government for their land’s acquisition which was much higher than the original cost.
The FIR adds that apart from illegally buying land which was locked under the acquisition process, the accused also defrauded the government by showing that dense orchards of guava were present on their land. As a result, the accused also received additional compensation for the income that they would have earned in the next 20 years from these orchards.
Dhiman said that when his wife purchased the land in 2018, it was already registered as an orchard farm and the assessment of the farms was done by the horticulture department. “I did not deal with any file related to acquisition. Nor did I approach anyone for enhancement of the assessment. By the time the compensation was announced, I had left GMADA,” he said.
The FIR says that in some cases, the accused did not buy the land but with the help of the village patwari managed to show themselves as lease holders of the land on which they planted guava trees. In such cases, they received compensation worth crores for the projected income from these orchards even when they did not own the land.
The FIR notes that in order to inflate the compensation, the accused managed to acquire a fraudulent assessment certificate from the horticulture department.
The FIR states that according to the guidelines issued by the Punjab Agriculture University, a single acre of land cannot have more than 132 guava trees. But, it added, the accused showed that 2,000 to 2,500 trees per acre were planted to enhance the projected income over the next 20 years for seeking compensation.
The horticulture officials involved in the scam allegedly gave certificates that the guavas growing in these orchards were of very high quality, which also qualified the owners for enhanced compensation.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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