Unscrupulous elements have allegedly resurfaced to sell premium land in this district headquarter town where the revenue watchdogs like the collectorate and Bhuj Area Development Authority (BHADA) have their offices.

After the buildings were flattened in the quake, the government came out with a rehabilitation scheme for the flat owners.

A state government resolution dated April 24, 2001 for the rehabilitation scheme firstly says the affected would be given new plots at a new relocation site for their resettlement at the prevalent jantri (the annual statements of rates) only if they surrendered their old land.

But the records now show that none of the plots ranging between 600 sq m and 800 sq m were surrendered by either flat owners or their housing society.

“When we came to know that the builders or promoters have the possession of the land even seven years after the government allotted new lands and that they were out to sell them on the basis of their old land entitlement documents, we applied to the BHADA and sought details. We were called to BHADA office to see the documents of such land and after going through 150 files of flat owners, we found that there was not a single land-surrender letter in the files,”Arvind Gadhavi, district president of the Shiv Sena, told this newspaper on Monday.

“The para five of the check-list, which specifically asks whether the land had been surrendered by the beneficiary, has been left blank,” he added. He also said he had sent a formal detailed complaint to chief minister Narendra Modi, naming “the then corrupt top officials of BHADA”, who were in league with unscrupulous elements and had taken huge bribes from them.

He said as per his information already some plot cases had been solved and their documents had even been registered with the registrar. Gadhavi said that currently negotiations were on for the sale of land of Deep Mandir Apartments in Nirmalsinh Vadi, Balaji Apartments in Bhanushali Nagar and Sahajanand Towers in Jadavjinagar. He added the present market value of these three plots was between Rs 80 lakh and Rs 1 crore each.

He alleged that the then BHADA chairman Pradeep Sharma (now Rajkot collector), who is also facing a court inquiry in another land scam, is involved in it, and that one top city BJP leader was negotiating with the builder in the case of Balaji Apartments and had shown readiness to pay Rs 70 lakh for it.