The decision comes soon after the I P Mission Trust leased out 4,000 sq m of land behind the Kanaknidhi Complex, Nanpura, and sold 26,608 sq m near Dumas. Both deals, according to action committee president Shashikant Solanki, were finalised at throwaway prices instead of their actual, considerable worth.

Under the current market rates, the Nanpura land, reserved for a women's hostel, could have reportedly fetched anything between Rs 12 crores to Rs 15 crores. The trust, however, leased out the land in four bits to four parties for 99 years for a total of Rs 50 lakhs.

The Dumas land, on the other hand, has been sold to an architect at the rate of Rs 105 sq mtr for Rs 27.98 lakh, while the prevailing rate was about 20 times more, alleged the committee, whose members have decided to gherao the chief trustee when he visited Surat on Sunday.

They have also decided to take CNI members in four luxury buses to Ahmedabad to protest before the Charity Commissioner, who will hear objections to the deal on November 11.

N N Mcwan, chairman of the Gujarat Christian Service Society, which runs the CNI institutions in Surat, however, said the land deals were warranted by the financial crisis the trust was facing. ``This is the only way the trust could have raised the money to finance its activities'', he said, pointing out that vacant plots and properties were always misused.

He claimed, moreover, the deals were yet to be finalised as the Charity Commissioner had not decided to whom the land would go and at what cost.

To support his claim that the trust was in a bad way financially, Mcwan said that the salaries of the staff that run the Dahod hospital had not been paid for the past three months.

He claimed that the Dumas land would not have fetched a higher price as it lay within 500 metres of the sea, within which limits the government had either banned or regulated construction.