Demolitions tear Bengaluru city apart

Bengaluru: A Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) site was once a prized possession but no more after Bangalore Development Authority razed several structures in HRBR Layout in North Bengaluru and issued notices to house owners who have been residing at these sites for long. All because the BDA has encroached on the Banasawadi lake-bed to create the layout!

So who is to blame when hapless house owners are forced onto the streets to watch their dreams come collapsing in a heap of rubble? “We have khatas, perfectly legal water and power connections, why punish us because the authorities went terribly wrong while creating the layout decades ago?” screamed a resident.

An upheaval is underway in the City of a thousand lakes which the real estate-bureaucracy lobby has reduced to a pitiful few. Recovering lakes as per a Supreme Court order is fine but who should bear the brunt? Gullible citizens who bought plots with hard earned money and loans or the real estate mafia who took them for a ride by grabbing lakes and doling out plots to them?  And who will punish BDA and other civic agencies for making everything seem perfectly legal till the apex court came cracking down on them?

Even Congress office is on encroached land: BJP

Leaders of the principal Opposition party, BJP, plan to make political capital out of the ongoing demolitions in Bengaluru, and have demanded an emergency session of the state legislature to discuss the drive launched by the state government. Former minister S. Suresh Kumar told the media that the KPCC office, which was built on Miller tank bed, should be demolished before clearing other encroachments in Bengaluru.

The government pulled down buildings without giving a thought to victims or about their rehabilitations nor was it initiating action against land sharks for encroaching upon government land and then selling the plots to gullible people.

Besides, homes constructed on BDA land were being knocked down as part of the drive though several buildings of the government were built on tank beds, he added. Referring to reclaiming of Kadugodi plantation area, where the district administration claimed to have recovered over 431 acres of encroached land, Mr Jagadish Kumar, MLA, said KIADB had acquired this large parcel of land way back in the 60's, but the forest department did not raise any objections at that point in time. Now, officials of that department were claiming that land belonged to them, he added.