Bengaluru: Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, on Wednesday, has briefed his Cabinet colleagues about the much-discussed issue of denotification of BDA land at Arakavathi layout and asked them to counter the charges being made by opposition parties on the issue.
The chief minister, who chaired the Cabinet meeting, explained with documents how subsequent governments since 2004 denotified lands in the layout. He gave a break-up of lands denotified by former chief ministers H D Kumaraswamy and B S Yeddyurappa and during the president’s rule in the State in 2007.
He is learnt to have claimed that his government has not denotified any land at the layout and said that the BJP has been trying to politicise the issue. He asked his cabinet colleagues to take on the Opposition head-on during the coming legislature session.
The Congress, which seems to be in a retaliation mode, is all out to prove, through a BDA report, that HD Kumaraswamy and B S Yeddyurappa were the ones who did the largest number of denotifications during their tenure without any court directions or reports.
The report by the Bangalore Development Authority which charts the progress of the Arkavathy Layout and its status since the final notification in 2004 will be placed before the probe the chief minister had ordered in July after an uproar by BJP in the legislature over the issue. The one-man commission inquiry headed by retired high court judge HS Kempanna will go into the entire Arkavathy Layout saga, since February 2004 when the BDA issued the final land notification for 2,750 acres spread across 16 villages, till April 2014, when the present government gazetted the final notification for the remodified scheme.
According to the BDA report, a copy of which is available with sources, Kumaraswamy had ordered for 78 acres 28 guntas denotification from February 2006 to October 2007 after the final land acquisition notification.
Next came Yeddyurappa 72 acres 12 guntas land from May 2008 to July 2011. In between, during the Governor’s rule after the fall of JDS-BJP coalition government, 46 acres and 35 guntas land was denotified from November 2007 to May 2008. D V Sadananda Gowda had directed negligible land denotifications, 25 guntas, in his 11-month tenure.
Responding to one of the BJP’s main allegations: “Unexplained and shocking enhancements in the lands to be deleted by the BDA from 140 acres in 2006 to 707 acres in 2014,” the BDA report has stated: “The lands denotified by the earlier governments under section 48(1) of Land Acquisition Act is 198 acres. This has been conveniently suppressed in the BJP report, because all these denotifications are arbitrary and has been done prior to 2013.”
