Time over, Kotla refugee colony still a shuttlecock

[karira]

As reported by Krishnadas Rajgopal in expressindia.com on 17 August 2008:
Time over, Kotla refugee colony still a shuttlecock - Express India

Time over, Kotla refugee colony still a shuttlecock

New Delhi, August 16 Ministries, dept clueless over RTI after ‘temporary’ stay over; ball now in L-G court

Fifty families displaced from Pakistan in 1947 and “temporarily” settled in Central Delhi’s Feroze Shah Kotla have a question for the government: “Where are you going to finally resettle us?”

And, “how long will the government take to finally resettle 50 families as two generations have already passed and the third generation is on the way?”

The questions are part of a Right to Information (RTI) request to the Union Urban Development ministry, which has no answers.

Equally in the dark about permanent rehabilitation of the “refugees” are the Department of Culture, the Land and Development Office (L&DO), and the Archeological Survey of India. The last because Vikram Nagar, in New Delhi district, is nestled next to the historic Feroz Shah Kotla.

Chief Information Commissioner Wajahat Habibullah noted: “This is simply a matter where no department is taking responsibility for an issue which, since it concerns rehabilitation of refugees of 1947, is an issue of national importance.”

The last bit of information Vikram Nagar residents have is from a Urban Development ministry response in May: that the 30-year lease granted to the colony by the Prime Minister on June 8, 1978 is drawing to a close.

“With the 30-year time-frame now expiring, the matter requires to be addressed with utmost urgency,” Habibullah said on an appeal filed by Lieutenant Colonel S C Kalra (retired), one of the colony’s residents.

The ministry’s response to Kalra in May, however, gives an insight on how the residents’ fate had “continuously engaged the government since 1947 up to the level of the Prime Minister”: The first few traces of information starts in June 1978, with then Prime Minister Morarji Desai ordering the removal of all houses within 25 strips of Kotla monument. The government had then cautioned the refugees from disrupting the skyline by building over the monument’s top.

The next trace is found in June 1985, when the Department of Culture decided to constitute a Group of Ministers after residents insisted on owning tenements they were occupying then.

Fast-forward three years, and May 1988 records that the residents found relief when officials approved the Culture department’s proposal to grant them land near the monument.

Under the approved proposal, the Delhi Lieutenant Governor’s office was to come up with a complete layout of developed plots to accommodate 50 families in an area near the monument. The residents were to be allotted land free of cost, and the Urban Development ministry and the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) were required to assist them with building plans and loans from HUDCO.

But as per the Urban Development ministry’s revelations, the rehabilitation effort started showing signs of frittering out with the Culture department failing to respond to the Union Home Ministry’s repeated queries — from 1994 to 1996 — about land earmarked for the colony. The trail stops for the UD ministry in January 2004, as no “further progress on the matter is available with the L&DO”.

To this, CIC Habibullah observed: “This is a question of not merely providing information but one about who should be holding the information which would have normally required priority by government, and has also been discussed at the highest levels.”

Noting that it was quite clear that both the UD ministry and the Department of Culture had no information available, the Commission leafed a few pages back to find that the Lieutenant Governor’s office was responsible for preparing the layout plan.

“It is that office which therefore must deal on the question of final rehabilitation/resettlement of families displaced from Pakistan,” the Commission observed.

Now? It has directed the L-G’s office to take “immediate steps” and provide the required information.