With the Minister away on a foreign tour -- he left today for a six-day visit to Israel to study low cost, durable and disaster-resistant housing schemes there -- top bureaucrats are getting their act together to take up issue with the Prime Minister on his (Jethmalani) repeated attacks on their fraternity.

Sources said that the Prime Minister was apprised of Jethmalani's open clash with top bureaucrats of his ministry by Principal Secretary Brajesh Mishra and Cabinet Secretary Prabhat Kumar, on his return from the NAM summit in Durban.

The Prime Minister is understood to have taken a serious view of the situation. He is reported to have conveyed to the protesting officers that he would personally take up theissue with Jethmalani. It is learnt that Aggarwal has been assured a suitable appointment elsewhere to break the impasse between her and Jethmalani.

Top bureaucrats are particularly upset with Jethmalani's statement yesterday, saying that quite a few IAS officers were a disgrace to their profession. Senior officials say that this sort of tongue lashing of the bureaucracy by a Minister is unprecedented.

Over the past few weeks, Jethmalani has got embroiled in a string of controversies and his candid briefings to the media has only made matters worse.

Apart from being at loggerheads with Aggarwal, the Minister also clashed with other top bureaucrats including Secretary Personnel Arvind Verma over the ordinance for the new CVC.

He has also kicked up a fresh controversy over his reported move to pressurise the NDMC to pay compensation to residents of the posh White House apartments, whose flats were demolished in 1996 for being constructed ``illegally.'' The NDMC has refused to pay any such compensationto the flat-owners, among them BJP MP Sanjay Singh and a host of other VVIPs.

Meanwhile, Minister of State for Urban Affairs Bandaru Dattatreya differs with Jethmalani over the possibility of promulgating an ordinance to repeal the Urban Land Ceiling Regulation Act (ULCRA).

Speaking to The Indian Express, Dattatreya ruled out the promulgation of an ordinance, saying that the proposal would invite strong protests from the opposition and was not politically feasible at the moment.

Jethmalani recently said that his ministry would go in for an ordinance to circumvent the long drawn process involved in passing the bill in Parliament.

Admitting that the failure to repeal ULCRA so far had caused a serious setback to the much-vaunted boom in the housing industry, Dattatreya said that there was no option left with the government but to wait till the next session of Parliament in November and hope that the Act would be scrapped then.

The bill repealing ULCRA is at present under consideration with theParliamentary standing committee on urban affairs. It was referred by the Government to the committee in July following protests by some Opposition leaders.

Dattatreya said the continuation of the Act had caused hundreds of acres of land in urban areas to remain locked and unavailable for development. Giving the example of Delhi -- where the government had opened up the housing sector and allowed private developers to construct houses provided they had 30 acres of contiguous land -- Dattatreya said the scheme had yet to take off because no land blocked under ULCRA had been freed so far.