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Land deals: Opposition grills State in House

- Photo: P. V. Sivakumar

LAND ROW: TDP president N. Chandrababu Naidu walks out of the House with party MLAs on Thursday.

HYDERABAD: The State Assembly was rocked by allegations and counter-allegations by the Congress and Opposition benches over allotment of large tracts of land to private companies in Hyderabad and elsewhere on Thursday.

At the end of a marathon debate, the entire Opposition, in a rare show of unity, staged a walkout in protest against the rejection of its demand for constituting a House Committee to probe into the allotment of land to software companies that have come up in Ranga Reddy district.

The controversy was generated over a question tabled by Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) member T. Harish Rao alleging that the Congress government had shown undue favours to a small group of people by selling precious land at throwaway prices in the name of promoting Information Technology (IT). Admitting that certain exemptions were indeed granted to the IT industry to attract investments and generate employment, the government denied flouting norms in allotment of land in contrast to the brazen actions during the Telugu Desam regime.

Leader of Opposition N. Chandrababu Naidu (TDP) alleged that the Congress received commissions in sanction of land to 94 Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to whom land, including wet and assigned land, was sold at Rs. 1 lakh an acre.

Even companies like IT major, Infosys, did not fulfil their promise of employment. It provided only 10,000 jobs as against 25,000 promised.

Finance Minister K. Rosaiah took on Mr. Naidu by recalling the hasty manner in which he got 900 acres of land registered for M/s IMG Bharata while heading a caretaker government in 2004. The Congress government had not entered into deals with corporates for even one-fourth of that extent of land.

Intervening in the debate, Chief Minister Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy said IMG Bharata was gifted away land at Rs. 40,000 an acre whereas Mr. Naidu’s wife sold an adjoining piece of land two years earlier at Rs. two crore an acre.

The TDP leader also finalised the tender for the Jurala power house in the few days left between polls and declaration of results in May 2004.

A remark by Dr. Reddy that the Congress government sold “unproductive lands vulnerable to encroachments” in order to raise resources for distribution of pensions, scholarships and other welfare programmes drew sneers from the Opposition members.

They said he had exposed the government’s inability to protect its own lands.

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