The vacation Bench of the Calcutta High Court on Friday refused to put a stay on the filling up of ponds being carried out by the Mani Bhowmik Education Foundation in the Tiljala area. The Court, instead, asked the petitioner to move the plea before a regular Bench after the vacation.

The East Kolkata Fishermen Co-operative Society had alleged that a foundation of Mani Bhowmik, a US-based physicist and a philanthropist, had started to fill up the society-owned ponds covering nearly 15 acres.

The petition claims the Fisheries department had handed over the 120-acre land to the East Kolkata Fishermen Co-operative Society in 1989 on lease for 25 years. Since then the cooperative society has been doing pisciculture in the area.

“But last year, the Land and Land Revenue department (L&LR) sold 15 acres of the ponds to the Mani Bhowmik Education Foundation through the district magistrate of South 24-Parganas,” said Santi Panda, the counsel for the society.

Last week, the foundation started filling up the ponds, he added.

Panda said the state government had illegally transferred the area to the foundation.

According to legal provisions, waterbodies cannot be filled up and thus the court should stay the filling up of the ponds in Tiljala, he argued.

The counsel for Mani Bhowmik Foundation, Jaijeet Mukherjee, maintained that the foundation had purchased the land from the state government at a price of over Rs 4 crore in 2007 — a year after the US-based philanthropist proposed to the Left Front government that he wanted to set up an academic institution in Kolkata.

... contd.