MoEF decision on Adarsh showcause reply today

Papers relating to the society have been reported missing and Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan said he asked the government to file an FIR,which it has.

The missing papers deal with the change in the road length to generate land for Adarsh,thereby changing the category from “road” to “residential purposes”. The Urban Development Department lodged an FIR Friday against unknown persons,reporting the disappearance of four pages of notings annexed to file 154/99 and alleging theft and destruction of evidence.

The notings on the missing pages were made around 2000-2003 during the tenure of Ramanand Tiwari as principal secretary P V Deshmukh as deputy secretary. UD officials say the notings pertain to the reduction of the width of Captain Prakash Pethe Marg from 60.97m to 18.40m. A huge chunk of this road was included in the residential zone; this included part of the plot on which the 31-storey building has come up.

The papers also had notings by department officials who finally allowed the society to carry out construction in the eco-sensitive CRZ II zone using a routine Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF) letter as a go-ahead for development.

The department has created a new file based on the “movement register”. “Our movement register shows the file has travelled till August 2003. We have recreated the sequence of events based on the register. Except for the file notings made by officials,we have been able to get together details on the subject matter of each correspondence and the people who have given the approvals,” said a government official.

The UD Department works with a rudimentary record-maintaining system wherein the already cramped office of the deputy secretary has doubled up as a record room for stacking heaps of key files over the years.

The official probe into the theft is restricted to just four pages,5,27,99,271,and some note sheets,but senior officers allege the notings section contained more than four pages and all are missing. Any government file has two sections,the correspondence section that lists all the letters sent and received regarding matters relating to the file’s subject,and the notings section that always has a serial number and a corresponding date and contains all instructions,permissions,and views of officers during the period when the file travels from office to office.