Kerala’s Industries Minister Elamaram Kareem and Revenue Minister K P Rajendran are in trouble over the controversial land deal for the privately promoted Rs 4000-crore Cyber City in Kochi, with the Congress-led Opposition and the BJP clamouring for their resignation or expulsion from the Cabinet. The Opposition is also pressing for a judicial probe into the deal.Meanwhile, the Kerala High Court on Monday issued notices to the state and Central governments on the deal, after accepting a PIL seeking to scrap the deal and to fix responsibility.A Mumbai-based builder — Housing Development and Infrastructure Limited (HDIL) — had bought 70 acres of disused prime land from a Central PSU, Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT) for a low Rs 100 crore through its subsidiary Bluestar Realtors Ltd to set up the project, which is now on the razor’s edge. But the land was part of the 100 acres of original Government land that the Government had given back to HMT on its request, exempting it from the land reforms regulations — specifically for its expansion plans, and not saleable or transferable.But Ministers Kareem and Rajendran had taken only a couple of hours at a meeting with HDIL in Thiruvananthapuram to regularise the land deal. This was after the state law secretary had formally recommended that the Government take back the land from HMT.That’s not all. Minister Kareem, who negotiated the deal and later laid the foundation stone for the Cyber City on that land, had taken pains in his inaugural address to insist that the deal was completely above board. But on Monday, the Additional Advocate General, appearing for the Government, conceded in the High Court that there might have been discrepancies and the Government was open to taking corrective action.Chief Minister VS Achuthanandan, who was originally supposed to lay the stone for the project, had backed off at the last moment saying he didn’t have enough details of the project, but Kareem himself had later claimed that he too would have stayed away from the event if the CM had told him.Kareem has been insisting that it is an IT project, which meant it was up to the IT department under CM to screen and iron things out, to make it happen. But the IT department has said it has no clue about it, and was not even approached for clearance.State Law minister Vijayakumar confirmed on Monday that his department did recommend that the land be taken back by the Government, but claimed the Cabinet needs to sit together and find out just why the recommendation was not heeded.Kareem had said that Mumbai-based HDIL had bid for and won the land in a “global tender”. But the tender advertisement had been placed only in Mumbai papers, and not even in the home state, Kerala.Kareem had also indicated that the project would measure upto two of the state’s strict benchmarks for Government-facilitated IT-related projects: employment generation, and a conspicuously high percentage of built up space going for IT itself and not commercial complexes or other real estate. But no enforceable agreement has been inked between the Government and HDIL on either — Kareem has since maintained that he had seen in the promoter’s brochure that the project would generate some 60,000 direct jobs, and also maintained that HDIL told him that 70 per cent of the built up space will be for IT-related activity.That apart, the promoter’s formal request for a fast track clearance of the project submitted to both the Revenue and Industries ministers talks mostly about housing and other real estate construction — it makes only a passing mention of IT-related activity.
