HC order to check hill plot

TT, Calcutta: Calcutta High Court on Thursday appointed a three-member committee to visit and find out the status of the Lansdowne property in Darjeeling town.

The land was booked with an initial down payment by the Gorkha Territorial Administration for construction of a secretariat beside its present headquarters at Lal Kothi.

As per the court's direction, the Darjeeling district magistrate, the principal secretary of the GTA and the owner of the land will visit the property on January 30 and 31 this year and submit a report before the court in the first week of February.

The court passed the order after the GTA moved a petition alleging that the owner of the land, even after receiving an advance, had sold out a portion to private parties.

According to case record, the GTA decided to construct a composite secretariat on the Lansdowne land and contacted its owner Kishore Lal Agarwal. He agreed to sell his land to the GTA against Rs 5.21 crore.

The GTA booked the land against an initial payment of Rs 2 crore and assured the landowner that the remaining amount would be given after getting approval from the state government.

In 2015, Agarwal moved a petition before Justice Sanjiv Banerjee alleging that the GTA was neither paying him the remaining amount nor allowing him to sell the land to others. Justice Banerjee had issued an order asking the state government, GTA and the landowner to sit together and settle the issue.

Meanwhile, political scene in the hills changed and the government constituted a five member board of administrators with Binoy Tamang as the head to run the GTA.

"When the new committee inquired about the Lansdowne property, it found that a portion of the land had already been encroached and another portion had been sold to private parties by the owner," Ayanava Raha, counsel for the GTA, told the court.

Agarwal's lawyer, Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya, told the judge: "The GTA's allegations are baseless." After a long gap, the case came up for hearing before the division bench of acting Chief Justice Biswanath Somadder and Justice Arindam Mukherjee on Thursday.