NEW DELHI: In a swift move, the Supreme Court has ordered a CBI probe into a house scam that may be far bigger than the hawala racket, regarding out of tum allotment of ‘over 8700 government houses for purely “‘extraneous considerations” involving officials of the Urban Development Ministry.

The probe ordered by a division bench comprising Mr. Justice Kuldip ‘Singh and Mr. Justice G.B. Patnaik will be conducted by the Deputy Inspector General, Anticorruption Bureau of the CBI, Mr. M.S. Bali.

‘The court ordered the inquiry after receiving over 200 complaints by anonymous persons naming the officials and urging the court to have they looked into.

‘The judges observed during the proceedings last week that not a single allottee had been granted the accommodation out of tum for genuine or ‘good reason.

“It appears from the complaints received by this court that this must have been a total racket and a conspiracy by these officials running this. ‘According to the anonymous complaints even if minimum of Rs20,000 had been taken as bribe by these officials for one allotment, the sum for the entire 8,700 houses would well exceed the money involved in the hawala racket,” the judges observed.

The judges said that all these 8,700 allotments had been done for “extraneous considerations” and there was not a single case where houses had ‘been given for a genuine or good reason.

All the 8,700 allotments have been made in the class one to four category houses for Government servants like section officers, peons and others.

‘When Mr. Tulsi urged the court that the eviction of these allottees, majority of them who were not well off, ‘would lead to human misery and problems, Mr. Justice Kuldip Singh observed that the court will not be deterred by these arguments, “If there are a thousand crooks we will not be still deterred. Why are you protecting these persons who are prima facie illegally occupying these houses?” He said that it was the Government’s duty to get these houses vacated and allot them to persons who had. Been waiting for allotments for the past 25 years.

Article extracted from this publication >>  February 21, 1996