Justice Patel, family file returns for Nagpur land

However, the family’s lawyers refuse to give  any details of the content of the returns

MUMBAI: Senior judge of the Bombay High Court Justice JN Patel and his family members on Monday afternoon filed returns for their 45-acre ancestral land at Mouza Chinchbhuvan. Sources said Justice Patel’s younger brother Hari Narayan Patel and his lawyer Sanjay Puranik filed the returns for the land under Section 6 (1) of Urban Land Ceiling Act, 1976, as the said land is covered under the Act.

The Patels filed the return after a show-cause notice was issued by ULC authorities.

The Patels have given a brief description of the total vacant land held by each person in the family and submitted the details to additional collector and a competent authority of ULC at Nagpur, U S Dahalkar.  The officials as well as lawyers for the family refused to divulge any further details about the
contents of the returns.

The ULC officers will now have to verify the details and carry out an on-site inspection of the land. They could also demand birth certificates of the family members and check whether they had reached adulthood at the time of urban agglomeration of the land in question. Till then, the land cannot be transferred or sold to anybody
without ULC’s permission.

Till 2001, the land was shown as no development zone-agriculture but as per the sanctioned Development Plan and Development Control Rules (DCR) 2001 for Nagpur city, a part of the said land was reserved for Railways, parking, roads, thereby making mandatory the submission of return under the ULC Act.

Under the ULC Act, no person can hold over 1500 sq mt of vacant land, which is the ceiling limit. The remaining land would be declared surplus and would be taken over by the state government.

Sources said notices were also issued to Jai Narayan Patel, Shri Narayan Patel and Hari Narayan Patel on August 6, 2007, since the letter dated May 14, 2007, went unresponded. The reminder sent by ULC mentioned that the land belonging to Patel family came under the purview of ULC and the family owned over 1,500 sq mt land (Khasra Numbers 25, 29 and 30 of Mouza Chinchbhuvan).

According to legal experts dealing with ULC matters, the ULC authority will scrutinise the return before finalising the retainable share of Patel family and surplus land. Within two months of this exercise, the landowner is entitled to apply for exemption by proposing some housing scheme on it.

Under Section 21 of ULC Act, the authorities may permit the scheme in which the low cost housing flats would be constructed and 5 per cent of such flats would be given free of cost to government. Government had scrapped the Talegaon Dabhade scheme (permissible under Section 20 of the ULC Act), in which exemption could be granted to land owners possessing surplus land declared under the ULC.