It's gross injustice if only the gullible were to pay

Punishing officials who colluded to allow encroachments of public commons is critical to protecting lakes for posterity

It is indeed a shocking sight to see steel bars protrude out of ugly concrete rubble from what were houses filled with the gaiety and the business of family life. The sight is no different, whether it is the aftermath of an earthquake or the demolition of buildings that have encroached lakes. For families who lost their homes in the Government's ongoing drive to recover encroached lake lands, no amount of rationalising will help console their pain. This brings up deeper questions. Why is it that these houses came up inside the lakes in the first place?

To find an answer, one needs to travel back in time, to 1976, when the most undemocratic urban planing agency ever conceived in post-independent India was established – the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA), modeled very much on the Delhi Development Authority. It was the time of Emergency and almost all decisions even about cities were directly controlled by the Chief Minister, and not uncommonly, by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The BDA was set up as an agency accountable mainly to the Chief Minister and thus designed to plan and develop Bangalore in a manner that suited the vision of the high political leadership - not of the people.

What resulted from BDA's planning in subsequent decades were a slew of massive neighbourhoods that were to accommodate the burgeoning population of Bangalore. As demands for more neighbourhoods and infrastructure grew, such as for bus stands, shopping complexes, and stadiums, and the agency was bankrupt and the Government was in no position to advance funds to buy private lands, the BDA did the next best thing: it began “developing” lakes and other commons from within the city area into layouts and infrastructure projects.

Soon this became epidemic. The tight, and almost wholly in-transparent control the agency had on land use planning and development created a variety of problems for the people.  For years there were hardly any neighbourhoods formed, thus spiraling the demand for housing sites.  This was an opportunity for rent seeking. A slew of ex-landlords (large farmers who saw their lands more as money than productive soil) turned real estate agents with bureaucratic and political patronage.  They began "converting" their lands into housing layouts, and while they did that, they packed in a few lakes and grazing pastures as well.  By design the BDA's functioning was not open to public review, and this helped real estate developers to collude with key bureaucrats, planners, Ministers and even Chief Ministers to fudge map and "create" land documents to present the neighbhourhoods as legitimate.  Many unwitting families, desperate in their search for a house site, but unable to get one from the BDA, resorted to buying into these private layouts.

While this was the case with the private layouts, not very different was the case with BDA itself. The agency too was guilty of developing BDA layouts inside lakes, as was recently uncovered in the case of Venkatarayana Kere in Gubbalala village of Uttarahalli Hobli. A Raja Kaluve connecting this lake with the Subramanya kere downstream has apparently been encroached by a vary famous developer – Mantri, and a massive apartment now stands there. This would not have been possible without the collusion of BDA and Revenue officials in sanctioning the plan, and later the BBMP in approving the apartment.

Following a series of Public Interest Litigations in which the High Court of Karnataka has directed the State to ensure lakes are protected, including by removing encroachments and stopping pollution, government agencies have finally begun to do the work they should have decades ago. When the Court undertook a survey of the status of lakes in Bangalore as an outcome of Environment Support Group's PIL advancing lake protection (W.P. No. 817/2008), the extensive nature of encroachment of city lakes and other commons became starkly evident.

This being the situation, a disturbing question that remains unaddressed yet is what should only people who gullibly bought these illegal properties be punished in the worst possible way - by the demolition of their homes and businesses, when officials of BDA, BBMP, Revenue Department, etc. who “approved” such properties as "legal" be allowed to go scot free?  It is critical to protect our lakes, and recover the ones that have been encroached. Perhaps there is a more humane way of doing that, particularly considering so many lower middle class and poor families were forced to be gullible due to the desperation of owning a home.  But if we want lakes not to be encroached again, it is necessary to criminally prosecute public officials and representatives who colluded in this massive scam. Else, only the gullible will pay with everything they have lost and that would be such a gross injustice.

(The Kannada version of this article is published in Prajavani on 2nd May 2015)