Dhar(Madhya Pradesh): A 16,500-page challan has been prepared in the St Teresa land scam by the Dhar police against 31 persons for being part of a crime that involved collusion with judicial and revenue officials, to grab 3.074 hectare of prime government land in Dhar city, known as Mission Compound, worth over Rs. 282 crores (market value).
SP Aditya Pratap Singh said that of 32 persons charged for the crime, all except Dhar-based businessman and main accused Sudhir Jain and his wife Ayushi and Ankit, have been arrested. Those arrested include a retired SDM and several Dhar Nagar Parishad officials. The properties owned by Sudhir Jain and five other properties have been confiscated by the administration.
The SP said the challan brings to conclusion an eight-month-long pain-staking investigation by Dhar police that busted an elaborate conspiracy, cheating, forgery, fabrication and manipulation of records by the accused. Two SITs had been formed under ASP Devendra Patidar and DSP Yashaswi Shinde, who was the lead investigator.
The said land was given to Dr Ms Margaret O’Hara, a missionary from Canada, by the then ruler of Dhar Anand Rao Pawar III to set up a hospital for women and her residential bungalow in 1895. A part of the land thus made available still houses the Mission Hospital which was inaugurated in 1897. Dr Margaret left India for Canada in 1927 and died in 1940. The land was never transferred in her name and the government (after independence) remained the owner, and Dr O’Hara was mentioned as caretaker of the land in revenue records. In 1972, Dr Ratnakar Peter Das, a tribal from Chhattisgarh, took over as superintendent of the Mission Hospital and in 1985, revenue records were manipulated and Dr Ratnakar Peter Das’s name came up as caretaker. However, he himself reaffirmed that he was only the caretaker and not the owner when in 1980 the United Church of Northern India claimed that the land belonged to them. A ruling by IV ADJ, Dhar on December 20, 2004 in the same case reaffirmed that Dr Das and his family did not have title over the land.
Despite this, after Dr Das’s death, his wife Dr Ila Das made a lease deed for 0.451 hectares of the land in Sudhir Jain’s (absconding) name. In 2009, a power of attorney was made in the name of Akilesh Sharma (another accused) and he sold the land to 14 persons (36 plots) for mere Rs 20 lakhs @ Rs 53 per square foot when the market price ran into thousands.
Later, Sudhir Das (Dr Das’s son) illegally executed 14 sale deeds and sold over 1.6 lakh square feet of land to various people.
Several other Christian organisations also claimed this land as their own, but their claims were found to be false by the revenue board and courts.
In between, the land use was illegally changed from residential to commercial by an SDM’s order in 2007-08, and based on that building permission was given by Nagar Parishad.
All the sales were also illegal because they did not have clearance of Town and Country planning and neither was the collector’s permission taken, which is necessary since Dhar is a scheduled area.
