BENGALURU: With the High Court ruling in its favour, the Bangalore Development Authority has started the process of taking possession of chunks of land in the Dr Shivarama Karanth Layout. The authority couldn’t do this earlier as landowners suddenly converted the land into nurseries so that they would be left out of the acquisition process.
“Though the final notification had been issued in connection with the acquisition, we could not take possession of these properties. The owners planted saplings and made them into small nurseries. There are at least 15 such nurseries in the layout now. They later approached the Supreme Court during the period of the Justice A V Chandrashekhar Committee seeking exemption against their land being acquired,” a top BDA official told TNIE. The landowners claimed that they supplied plants raised there to farmers.
The cases were later transferred by the Supreme Court to the high court after the committee wound up. “The court recently ruled that creating a nursery in one’s space cannot be a reason for not acquiring these properties,” he added.
The patches of land in the middle could not acquired. “This hampered our infrastructure work in the layout and we can now go ahead with them. We started the process of taking possession of these lands since Monday,” the official said.
Karanth Layout has 34,000 sites. It is awaiting the green signal from the high court for allotment of sites.