HC cancels Rishikesh housing project

In a setback to the Uttarakhand government, the High Court at Nainital today cancelled the controversial Rishikesh housing project and said an inquiry may be ordered in this regard.

A division bench of the High Court comprising Chief Justice Barin Ghosh and Justice V K Bist also asked the government to withdraw all the incentives given to Citurgia Biochemicals, the owner of the industrial land.

The court observed that bureaucrats misled the government, which resulted in granting permission for land use change to a private developer to construct a housing project. However, the court did not accept the demand for a CBI probe in the deal, which Chief Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank has defended repeatedly.

The government had so far maintained that it only followed the advice of the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) on the matter. The government last year accorded permission to Mumbai-based Citurgia Biochemical limited, which was producing chemical carbonate at its Rishikesh plant, to sell big chunk of its land to a private developer for constructing a housing project. A lockout was declared in the Citurgia factory in 2003 after it became sick and the matter was referred to the BIFR. Though the government claimed that permission for the housing project was accorded under a BIFR revival scheme, opposition parties and NGOs had cast aspersions saying there is no permission for constructing a housing project along the river on environmental grounds. The Citurgia company had so far maintained that it sold a part of the factory’s land to raise funds as part of the BIFR revival scheme.