Former Patiala town planner, ex-PCS officer booked for graft

PATIALA: Punjab vigilance bureau has booked former PCS officer Ashok Kumar Sikka and former municipal town planner of Patiala Shakti Sagar Bhatia, along with a coloniser, for approving a colony which showed a government canal as green area, causing a loss of ₹3.5 crore to the state exchequer in 2014. Sikka retired as deputy director local bodies at Patiala. Both officers passed illegal colonies, according to the vigilance.

Coloniser Devinder Singh Sandhu, the promoter of WWICS Estate Private Limited, and Nagender Rao, the company’s general manager, have also been booked. The First Information Report (FIR) was registered on investigation into illegal colonies, approved on the basis of forged documents. “Lot of discrepancies were committed. The colony was regularised, when there was no such policy existing in August 2014. The government land of a canal and some shamlat land was shown as Green Area in a private colony, and even plots were carved on such land. Officials, in nexus with private colonisers, showed this as two separate colonies, and caused a loss of Rs 3.5 crore to the state exchequer,” a vigilance official said.

The FIR adds that Sikka and Bhatia, in league with Sandhu, misused their official positions and got colonies passed by showing these as being sold in 2012, even as stamp papers used for documentation were purchased in 2014. “They did it deliberately, which smells of corruption, thus the Prevention of Corruption Act has been invoked against them,” a vigilance official added. The vigilance has also taken a note of the fact that in March 2019, the local bodies department secretary rejected the No-Objection Certificate (NOC) for both the colonies, Imperial County-1 and Imperial County-II, and declared these as illegal. However, Pushpa Rani, a senior assistant at office of deputy director, Patiala, kept the file pending for 18 months. Once the vigilance started probe, the permission to colonies was cancelled. The accused were booked under Sections 420, 467, 468, 471 of IPC and Corruption Act.