RAJASTHAN: JAL MAHAL MAY RISE AGAIN
Gehlot hopes to revive a two-decades-old pet project to transform Jaipur’s dilapidated lake palace
There is hope yet for the Rs 1,000 crore Jal Mahal project 17 years after the Rajasthan government invited bids to transform the picturesque Mansagar lake with a palace at its centre into a tourist attraction in Jaipur. On Friday, the Rajasthan High Court quashed the FIRs against main investor Navratan Kothari, ex-deputy election commissioner of India Vinod Zutshi, IAS officer Hridyesh Kumar and others for fraud and conspiracy in the award of the contract. Says Kothari, 78, who was arrested in the case once in 2013, “At my age, all I wish is to give Jaipur a magnificent palace before I die, not make money .... ”
Located between the Amer Fort and the Pink City, the man-made lake built by Jaipur’s rulers between the 16th and 18th centuries, got entangled in the political tussle between Ashok Gehlot—then a Congress chief minister in his first tenure in 2000—and his successor from the BJP, Vasundhara Raje. The Gehlot government finalised the bids just before the poll results came out in December 2003 and Raje gave it the go-ahead in February 2004. Subsequently, though, she did an about-turn. A series of cases were filed at various stages, with Gehlot failing to get it completed even during his second tenure (2008-13) and Raje failing to get it cancelled it in her term (2013-18).
KGK Enterprises, a consortium of companies, had won the award for cleaning and maintaining the lake, restoring and renovating the palace and building two hotels and a handicrafts bazaar. While Jaipur-based jeweller and real estate baron Kothari is the patriarch, some of the other companies in the consortium had links to Mofatraj Munot, owner of the Mumbaibased Rs 5,000 crore Kalpataru group. Given Munot’s family ties with Gehlot, the BJP cried favouritism in the award of contracts. The allegations included handing over of land worth Rs 3,500 crore, waiving of Rs 65 crore stamp duty and making changes in the project design. Kothari told india today that all the charges were false and that he never intended to exceed the construction beyond the approved 13 per cent of the total land area.
The courts also gave inconsistent verdicts over the years in different cases. As the high court said in its latest judgment, in 2010, one magistrate ordered an FIR after three different investigating officers had concluded that no offence was committed. Meanwhile, KGK renovated and restored the lake where sewage of the city was dumped, and took up other work on the palace and setting up of decantation tanks to clean sewage. But the high court, responding to a PIL, stayed the works in 2011 and, a year later, struck down the project. Meanwhile, the apex court upheld the contract in 2014 but in another judgment refused to quash the FIR from 2010. The Raje government, then, tried to get the lake declared a protected area in 2015, but the KGK group got a status quo order against it in court.
Kothari, who says he has already spent Rs 150 crore on the project, says he will now move the apex court to get a status quo order on his contempt plea removed following quashing of the criminal case. Ajay Kumar Jain, the lawyer who has been pursuing various cases including the one that the high court decided, says he too will move the apex court against the quashing of the FIR. ■
THE INCONSISTENT VERDICTS OF THE COURTS KEPT THE CASE IN LIMBO