New Delhi: Jharkhand High Court has directed the state police and anti-corruption bureau to register an FIR and investigate state officials for their alleged role in allowing encroachments on land acquired by the government decades ago for a medical institute.
In a first-of-its-kind order, the court on 20 December also directed the state government to “fix accountability on each and every official who is involved in the said malpractices”, and compensate residents whose structures have been or would be demolished.
A division bench of Chief Justice Tarlok Singh Chauhan and Sujit Narayan Prasad added that the payments must be borne by the “erring officials” responsible for allowing construction on government land, asking why the state exchequer “should be made to bear the expenses of compensating the affected persons due to the illegality committed by the officials of the State Municipal Corporation”.
The court said the residents had to be compensated because the buildings being demolished belonged to flat-owners and land purchasers who had invested their hard-earned money. It added that if officials had been vigilant, people would not have suffered as a result of the demolition of the illegal construction on government-acquired land.
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What the case was about
The case revolves around seven acres of land the government acquired in the 1960s for the Rajendra Institute of Medical Science (RIMS), Ranchi, which was encroached upon over the years.
The court acted on its own motion against the Jharkhand government, after the Jharkhand State Legal Services Authority (JHALSA) submitted a report flagging encroachment on seven acres of land on the RIMS premises.
The report, based on a court-ordered inspection, found that encroachment included temples, parks, schools, and permanent and makeshift homes. Street vendors had also occupied the land, blocking the movement of emergency vehicles like ambulances.
Some land was registered in the name of the subsequent transferees.
The report said that the RIMS administration and the district administration had not implemented a time-bound or coordinated plan for eviction and removal of the encroachments, adding that the continuing encroachments reflected “systemic administrative lapses and lack of accountability”.
On 3 December, the court directed the encroachers to remove their belongings while noting that there cannot be any “lawful ownership or any other claim” by a person or authority over this government land.
It gave them 72 hours to remove their belongings and hand over the land, failing which the district administration would take “all necessary steps” to evict the encroachers, including police action.
Several residents then went to court, pleading they were not encroachers and showed documents to support their claim that they were title holders.
But the court dismissed their claims on 11 December, saying a government notification from 1963 showed this land had been acquired by the government for constructing physicians’ homes and hostels for the RIMS campus. The court said the residents had to be evicted as the land was technically under “illegal possession”.
It also noted that revenue authorities who issued rent receipts and non-encumbrance certificates, or sanctioned building plans were culpable.
How the court took action
To ensure that such violations are not repeated, the court on 20 December decided to consider the “illegality” on the part of officials who permitted the illegal construction.
It also noted that revenue records had been manipulated and building plans sanctioned by the Ranchi Municipal Corporation and approved by the Real Estate Regulatory Authority.
“The land in some of the cases has also been registered in the name of the subsequent transferee(s) and the revenue record(s) has been manipulated, rent receipt(s) have also been issued as also non-encumbrance certificate(s),” the court said in its order.
Although the court noted that authorities had begun removing the encroachments, it added that the fact that such encroachment was allowed in the first place was still a question that remained unanswered. “The question is that how in the first place such construction has been allowed to be there in the acquired land which has been acquired way back in the year 1964-65,” the court said in the 37-page order.
The court expressed shock that at no stage did the officials or authorities question the land title, which was transferred in favour of private parties, even though the land had already been acquired by the government.
“This Court is astounded to note as to what the RIMS authority were doing when the buildings were being constructed within the precincts of the RIMS,” the bench noted.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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