Bihar’s Nitish Kumar-led JD(U)-BJP government was on Tuesday jolted by revelations of an alleged land allocation scam in which the sons, daughters and relatives of ministers, legislators and MPs of the ruling parties and top officials were allotted prime industrial land allegedly in violation of rules.
Sizeable chunks of land belonging to the Bihar Industrial Area Development Authority (BIADA) across the state were allotted to people with apparently little industrial background but with unavoidably noticeable relations with politicians and bureaucrats close to the chief minister. The allotments, as legislators of the Opposition parties alleged during their furious protests in the Assembly on Tuesday, were made without any advertisements and tenders and at prices much lower than the norm. Some plots of industrial land were also allotted for non-industrial purposes.
The Cabinet ministers and others alleged to have secured benefits for their kin through the BIADA land allotments denied violation of any rules. But with all the Opposition parties suddenly getting hyperactive in a rare show of unity during the Assembly’s ongoing Monsoon Session and some of them later burning Mr Kumar’s effigy, a beleaguered chief minister ordered a probe into the allegations by state chief secretary Anup Mukherjee. Deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi of the BJP, who returned from Delhi on Tuesday, said he was unaware of the allegations.
Prominent among those who got plots of BIADA land were HRD minister P.K. Shahi’s daughter Urvashi Shahi, social welfare minister Parveen Amanullah’s daughter Rahmat Fatima (her father, Afzal Amanullah, is a serving senior IAS officer in Bihar), JD(U) MP Jagdish Sharma’s son Rahul Kumar, and former BJP legislator Awdhesh Narayan Singh’s son. People considered close to IAS officials S. Siddharth, Vijaylakshmi and IG (Jail) Anand Kishore were also allotted BIADA plots.
“The government’s tall claims of clean and transparent rule have now been exposed as a big bundle of lies. This is a major scam in which prime industrial land was virtually gifted to people close to the chief minister and the alliance partner at throwaway prices in an illegal manner,” said leader of Opposition in the Assembly, Abdul Bari Siddiqui.