BENGALURU: The inquiry committee ordered by the Supreme Court recently, to probe the role of Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) and government officials in carving 446 acres out of the Dr Shivram Karanth Layout, has been set up last week. However, the BDA now faces a Herculean task in its efforts to revive the layout — the second largest BDA layout — for the city as mandated by the Court.
The inquiry officer — Justice K N Keshavanarayana, a former High Court senior judge — has begun the process of gathering all information pertaining to the layout, which was to be formed on 3,546 acres and 12 guntas of land. The SC ruling on August 3 struck down the September 2, 2015, High Court order that cancelled the layout formation and gave BDA the green signal to form the layout, set to have 18,975 sites spread across 17 villages between Doddaballapur and Hesaraghatta.
According to a highly placed BDA source, “Formation of the layout would be a complicated task as less than 1,500 acres on which it was originally planned, is available now.” With no clear land records available with the BDA, the process of identifying the owners is being undertaken with urgency, he said. “Over the years, people have sold their lands to others, who have in turn sold it to someone else. Even private layouts have come up in a few areas,” another source said. “With the Supreme Court asking BDA to issue its final notification for the layout within three months (before November 3) of its order, the authority is set to face many legal challenges from landowners now,” he said. “A barrage of litigation awaits us as we take steps to form the layout,” the source added.
A clear decision needs to be taken by the government on what would be status of the property built or land bought after the Layout was cancelled, he said. Another official said, “A survey commissioned by BDA in 2014 (before the HC order) by HDFC Realty Limited found out that only 800 acres remained available for the proposed layout. However, this survey left out the 703 acres denotified subsequently.”
An official said thousands of landowners had filed cases against the preliminary notification by BDA on December 20, 2008, to acquire their lands. Caught in litigation, BDA could not issue a final notification.
Meanwhile, the BJP government removed 257.2 acres out of it through its orders between 2008 and 2010, while the BDA issued a series of denotification orders between 2010 and 2012 to remove 446 acres out of the layout. Finally, the High Court ended up cancelling the Layout formation and the BDA took the case to the Supreme Court.
