The Madras High Court on Tuesday granted four weeks time to the Advocate-General to file the counter to a public interest litigation petition which challenges the Government Discretionary Quota (GDQ) in the Tamil Nadu Housing Board (TNHB)'s allotment schemes. As per the guidelines for the quota, 15 per cent reservation was made in the schemes and the plots/flats/houses/shops/sites reserved under the GDQ should be allotted only to certain categories which were mandatory, the petitioner said.
The court also said as regards the relief sought in the petition to cancel or set aside the allotments already made under the quota, the petitioner should implead the allottees as party respondents.
The First Bench consisting of the Chief Justice M.Y.Eqbal and Justice T.S.Sivagnanam passed the order on a petition by N.S.Ziauddeen of Alwarpet here, an advocate.
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The petitioner said he was filing the writ petition relating to the allotments in Chennai. He alleged that the quota had been consistently abused and misused by political parties in power every five years. Such a trend had been increasing in the last 10 years and reached its peak in the last three or four years. Throwing the mode of allotment under the GDQ to the winds, allotments had been made to VIPs, IAS and IPS officers, judicial officers and “most importantly to persons owing affiliation to the ruling political party.”
In the process, there was no publication as mandated and no applications were received.
A condition was that a person was entitled to allotment under GDQ only if he/she/family member/children did not own any other property in the country. This had been disregarded and VIPs, ruling party men, judicial officers, IAS and IPS officers either in their own names/in the names of their spouses or children had been allotted various plots/properties. Many persons who were close to the ruling party had “suddenly designated themselves as social workers in spite of the fact that they are professionals.”
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Many persons in the legal field had also been allotted plots under the GDQ. Even in the case of members of judiciary, norms of allotment had been violated.