In Rajasthan’s Bayana town, housing scheme applicants say area MLC, relatives of former MLA made them apply; near-impossible to raise money for possession

Hari Singh, a daily wage labourer in Bayana, a town 50 kilometres from Bharatpur, earns Rs 80 to Rs 100 on a good day by lifting sacks of wheat at the local mandi. Like many in this small town in Rajasthan, life for Singh and his family — wife Kishen Devi, three children and two grandchildren — is a daily struggle to make ends meet.

What’s worse, as winter bites harder a part of the roof of their hut in Kolipada, a Dalit locality in Bayana’s ward number 4, has fallen off. And Kishen Devi, 50, said they do not have enough money to get it repaired.

Their children, two of them in their teens, have never attended school — “we never had money to send them to school” — and work at a tea stall in the town.

Singh, though, learnt recently that he has been allotted a flat, worth approximately Rs 20 lakh, in the Capital through the Delhi Development Authority’s 2008 housing scheme.

“I never applied for a form, and never paid any application money (Rs 5,678),” he said. “I was told to sign papers by the local councillor.”

Several others from the town also said Sumera and a relative of Attar Singh Badhana, a former MLA from Bayana constituency, had asked them to fill up forms for the housing scheme, now in the eye of an alleged rigging storm.

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