A day after Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister said that the government would recover home buyers’ money from Ansal Properties and Infrastructure Limited, a BJP legislator has called for investigating the role of the Lucknow Development Authority (LDA) in the whole fraud.
It is noteworthy that complaints against Ansal were first made in 2016- but the LDA refused to take note. Yogi Adityanath had, on Tuesday, said in the Assembly that the Ansal scam too was a product of the Samajwadi Party rule.
In 2006 the company launched a project named ‘Sushant Golf City’, with the promise of giving possession in three years.
The harried home buyers first approached the LDA with complaints in 2016, but no action was taken. However, since 2017, more than 20 FIRs have been filed in Lucknow against the company. This was the year when the BJP came to power in the state and the government made its intent in dealing with errant builders very clear.
There have been for long whispers of collusion between officials, politicians and the builder to make this scam possible.
Now Rajeshwar Singh, a former IPS officer and the party MLA from Sarojini Nagar in Lucknow has written to the CM to demand that the LDA too be investigated.
Singh has requested that an inquiry be initiated on how the LDA permitted the company for the project when the group already owed huge sums of money to the authority. He has also asked if the LDA had ever informed home buyers that there had been complaints of delayed possession and poor construction among others against the group. There must also be an investigation into what, if any, steps were taken by the LDA to protect the interests of home buyers.
Though insolvency proceedings against the company have been ordered by the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT); even if the company were to somehow pay back the money it has taken from buyers, it would now be unable to get land or houses in the area where the proposed township was to come up as land prices have shot up many times. Even if bank interest rates are added to the returned money, this will not equal the almost 10 times increase in the price of land.
