Politics around land has always been a problem

It takes an extraordinary man to resist temptation, given that everyone bends the rules.

picked parties. A mere piece of paper authorising one to reclaim, say, three acres of land from under the sea was enough to turn a pauper millionaire overnight. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Naik-Patel duo made many such paupers multimillionaires, names of some of them adorning various multi-storey towers that dot the concrete jungle on the tip of south Mumbai.

So, if a Khadse, or, for that matter, a Robert Vadra is now embroiled in messy land transactions, you have to thank the growing power of ordinary citizens. Contrary to the general impression that corruption has grown manifold in recent years, the truth is that till the advent of the institution of Public Interest Litigation, till the enactment of the right-toinformation, and a watchful 24x7 media, ruling politicians in the early decades after Independence had got away with a lot of unwholesome stuff.

And should you think only politicians lust after land, think again. A former Chief Election Commissioner got not one but two plots of land from the Chief Minister’s discretionary quota against the rules, which specifically bar anyone getting more than a single plot from such quotas, and sold one to construct a bungalow on the other. He now pontificates to the world about probity. A former Chief Justice of Punjab and Hary- ana High Court got two plots out of the same quota, one for self another for spouse, and promptly sold both and made a huge killing. It does take an extraordinary man to resist temptation, given that everyone else is bending the rules to make a quick buck. output of small and medium industries, particularly in the unorganised sector, was being computed for estimating final numbers. But to suggest that the data are wilfully distorted is to insult the intelligence of widely-respected experts manning the Central Statistical Organisation.