The Hindu : Cong. bid to defend land allotment to school

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jun 09, 2002

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Cong. bid to defend land allotment to school

By Rajesh Ahuja

CHANDIGARH JUNE 8 . Even as the Opposition parties, particularly the BJP, have upped the ante against the Congress in the Union Territory of Chandigarh by blowing up the controversy relating to allotment of six acres of land to the Heritage Education Society, promoted by Ambika Soni, the Political Secretary to the AICC supremo, and the local MP, Pawan Kumar Bansal, which has been licenced by the Delhi Public School to open a branch of the school here, embarrassed Congressmen have gone on a virtual spree to defend their party leaders.

The propaganda machinery of the BJP is trying to extract full political mileage by alleging that people close to the AICC president, Sonia Gandhi, are allegedly misusing their position to put pressure on the Chandigarh administration to bend the rules and violate the norms related to allotment of the land to the society. BJP leaders of all hues are crying hoarse that Ms. Soni and Mr. Bansal are allegedly using the society to `amass wealth' in the name of bringing a top notch Delhi school, whose chairman is a senior Congress leader, to the City Beautiful.

According to political observers, the latest controversy has come as a God sent opportunity to the local unit of the BJP, which otherwise was looking for local issues with which to criticise the ruling Congress in the Chandigarh Municipal Corporation. The other local players, including the Nationalist Congress Party and the Janata Party too have joined the bandwagon and are repeatedly demanding a CBI enquiry into the whole episode.

These parties are also annoyed with the local administration big-wigs who are consistently defending the allotment of land to the society. According to the president of the local unit of Janata Party, Ajay Jagga, the allotment of land to education institutions (schools) on lease hold basis under scheme of 1996 has defined its purpose and terms, but the same were changed or ignored in an arbitrary manner to defeat the purpose of rehabilitating the schools in violation of building bye-laws. The 1996 policy stipulated that the education institutions should have at least one year experience in running a recognised school on the date of notice inviting the applications. But, the condition relating to one year's experience was changed in December 2001 under political pressure and replaced with "requisite competence and experience'' in running an institution.

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Cong. bid to defend land allotment to school