Gurugram: HSVP clears 2,000 shanties to free land for housing project
GURUGRAM: The Haryana Shehri Vikas Pradhikaran (HSVP) razed around 2,000 shanties on ten acres of prime land in Sector 49 on Friday. The move was aimed at clearing land for a group housing project and plotted development.
The development came after the Punjab and Haryana high court directed the HSVP to conduct a survey of the area that is under encroachment and share details of the action taken by it.
A petition related to the encroachment was pending with the high court, which finally gave the decision in HSVP’s favour. Subsequently, the authority appointed a duty magistrate and carried out the demolition.
The drive on Friday, officials said, was a part of a larger project to clear 26 acres earmarked for HSVP’s group housing project.
A senior HSVP official said the campaign would continue for the next three days till the entire patch of land was cleared.
“Now, plans for a group housing society, plot cutting and Ashiana housing scheme are being prepared on this patch of land. As soon as the encroachment on the land is removed, fencing work will begin to prevent the land from being illegally occupied again,” he said.
Earlier this year, HSVP officials had initiated an auction of the plots with a total area of 60 acres with an aim to generate several crores of revenue. The authority had also initiated a large-scale demolition drive to retrieve HSVP-owned land from encroachers.
The auction included 28 sites located in sectors 9, 9A, 10A, 28, 31/32A, 37C, 38, 39, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 53, 54 and 56.
Another HSVP official said the sites were being cleared of encroachments and are being put on the auction list for group housing projects. They have managed to clear several sites in order to generate revenue from the plots.
In March this year, a bench of justices GS Sandhawalia and Harpreet Kaur Jeewan had observed that in several cases, land in the district was acquired more than two decades ago. The state deposited compensation running into hundreds of crores, but the encroachers continued to possess the land at the state’s cost by challenging the petition by HSVP.
The order, eventually, was passed against them.
