Odisha Vigilance registers cases against 15 in DQ allotments case

Odisha Sun Times Bureau
Cuttack, Oct 30:

The Odisha Vigilance has registered criminal cases against 15 persons in the Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA) and Cuttack Development Authority (CDA) discretionary quota (DQ) land allotment case.

While six of them are employees of BDA and an equal number are employees of CDA, the remaining three are land allottees.

The Vigilance has instituted cases against them under sections 13/2, 13/1D of the Prevention of Corruption Act and sections 200, 202, 68, 420 and 120B of the IPC.

The BDA employees against whom cases have been instituted are Satyabrata Rout, Benudhar Behera (both OAS officers); Srinivas Jena, Manoranjan Mishra (both billing assistants) and Kashinath Tripathy, Bimal Chandra Paramguru (both section officers).

Similarly, CDA employees against whom cases have been instituted are Abhaya Kumar Patra (junior assistant); Sakti Prasad Acharya, Ramchandra Hansda (both section officers); Sukant Kishore Mohanty (land officer); Phanibhusan Rout (member engineer) and Ramchandra Nath (secretary).

Besides, cases have been registered against Bishnupriya Panigrahi and Kalpana Padhi, who had purchased land from BDA under DQ and against Agadhu Charan Mishra who had purchased land from CDA under DQ.

“We have registered five cases–four under BDA jurisdiction and one under CDA jurisdiction. In total we have registered cases against 15 to 16 persons. They are mainly allottees and few government officers,” said Kunwar  Brajesh Singh, director Vigilance.

Following controversy over multiple allotments of plots/flats under DQ, the state government constituted a taskforce under senior IAS officer Taradatt. The taskforce in its report submitted to the government on November 3 last year recommended cancellation of allotments of plots/flats/houses made under DQ from January 1, 1995 onwards. The state government approved the taskforce report on December.

A total of 1791 allotments had been made under the discretionary quota since January 1, 1995.Out of this, 803 had been allotted by Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA), 921 by Cuttack Development Authority (CDA) and 67 by Odisha State Housing Board (OSHB).