Gurugram: For years, the village of Pilkhani in Ambala district would go dark after sunset, simply because there was no electricity supply. So when the Gram Panchayat decided to give up its own land to bring in a power sub-station, the villagers expected relief.
What they got was a criminal trial.
The sarpanch and eight panches who had signed off on that decision ended up in a legal battle against a criminal complaint for nearly eight years.
The Punjab and Haryana High Court has now quashed the case against them, calling the prosecution a “total misuse of the criminal law”, and ordered the complainant to pay Rs 1 lakh in costs to the Gram Panchayat for filing what it termed a false and frivolous complaint.
The panchayat, elected for the 2016-2020 term, had passed a resolution in 2013, allocating 32 kanals and 11 marlas of land for a 66 KV sub-station to be built by Haryana Vidyut Parsaran Nigam Limited (HVPNL). A kanal in the state measures about 5,445 square feet, or an eighth of an acre, while a marla is about 272. 25 square feet.
The tehsildar fixed a market valuation, and the land was formally transferred through a sale deed in 2018 for a sum of over Rs 1.01 crore, credited directly to the Gram Panchayat’s account. The sub-station was inaugurated by then chief minister of Haryana, Manohar Lal Khattar, on 5 January 2017. Welcome power flowed to the village.
But a villager named Gurdev Singh, who claimed a share in the land as one of its ‘mushtarka malkan’ (joint owner) filed a criminal complaint against the sarpanch and panches in 2018, alleging forgery, cheating and criminal conspiracy. He accused them of manipulating panchayat resolutions and fabricating the sale deed. A magistrate’s court in Ambala summoned all nine panchayat members to face trial in March 2019.
The panchayat members moved the high court to quash the complaint, arguing they had gained nothing personally, that the money was sitting untouched in a fixed deposit in the panchayat’s account, and that the entire exercise had been carried out with full institutional oversight — the tehsildar’s valuation, the Block Development and Panchayat Officer’s clearance, and HVPNL’s approvals.
Hearing the matter, Justice Sanjay Vashisth agreed, noting that the complainant had first approached the police, who found no substance in his allegations, before he filed the private complaint. Nothing in the complaint, the judge observed, suggested any of the accused had pocketed a single rupee, and the sale deed itself had never been challenged in any court.
The judge went further, describing the panchayat’s initiative as the kind of “progressive and developmental project” that is “rarely undertaken” by village panchayats, and said it deserved to be encouraged rather than punished. He directed that a copy of the order be circulated among panchayats across Punjab and Haryana as a model to follow.
Singh has been given until October 17 to pay the Rs 1 lakh cost, failing which he will be liable to pay an additional Rs 1,000 for every day of delay.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)