Puducherry Minister for Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs A.K. Sai J. Saravanan Kumar has filed a writ petition in the Madras High Court seeking a direction to the Chief Secretary to grant free house site pattas for the landless poor in the Oussudu constituency represented by him.
When the petition was listed for admission before Justice N. Sathish Kumar, the latter directed the High Court Registry to place it before Acting Chief Justice D. Krishnakumar for appropriate orders since a related case, filed in 2020, was pending before the first Division Bench.
In his affidavit, the Minister said the Government of Puducherry devised a scheme in 2006 for providing free house site pattas to the landless poor. Then, a piece of land measuring 94.0 acres at Koodapakkam revenue village was acquired for being distributed to the beneficiaries.
Subsequently, the Directorate of Survey and Land Records prepared a sketch consisting of 102 plots. However, when the plots were about to be allotted, S. Arokiadoss, vice-president of an association of unemployed people, filed a writ petition in the High Court in 2019.
A Division Bench comprising Justices S. Manikumar (since retired) and Subramonium Prasad (now a judge of Delhi High Court) allowed the writ petition on June 6, 2019 and set aside the entire selection process as well as a tentative list of 91 beneficiaries prepared by the Directorate.
The Bench directed the Director of Survey and Land Records to redraw the list by strictly following the procedure contemplated in Pondicherry Land Grant Rules, 1975 and ordered that the entire exercise of finalising the beneficiaries should be completed within two months.
When steps were taken to redraw the list, Mr. Arokiadoss filed another case in 2020 alleging political considerations in grant of patta and violation of the orders passed by the court in 2019. On April 15, 2021, a Bench led by the then Chief Justice Sanjib Banerjee (since retired) granted an interim stay.
The Bench ordered that no patta should be issued until the diposal of the 2020 writ petition and without the express approval of the court. Since then, the scheme remains in a limbo and the people in his constituency, reserved for the Scheduled Castes, were not able to benefit out of it, the Minister lamented.
Stating that he had written a letter to Chief Minister N. Rangasamy as well as Puducherry Government Pleader to get the 2021 interim order vacated, the petitioner sought a direction to the Puducherry government to implement the scheme by inviting fresh applications from his constituency.
