NEW DELHI: The UPA government had waived a rent bill of a `1.98 crore of former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar for the 6 Krishna Menon Marg bungalow she occupied, an RTI reply revealed.
RTI activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal had filed RTI plea at the Ministry of Urban Development. He was informed that no records were available with it for the waiver of the rent.
The bungalow was allotted to Kumar’s father and former union minister Babu Jagjiwan Ram and passed on to his widow Indrani Devi. After her mother’s death, Kumar converted the bungalow into an unofficial memorial of her father and retained it. Neither the Directorate of Estates nor the Lok Sabha Secretariat have asked for a rent waiver. Agrawal demanded that “the Centre should re-generate the rent-bill for recovery because the bungalow was kept forcibly and illegally occupied as an unofficial memorial.”