Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda may claim his government has not taken any decision on building homes for legislators on land used by ICAR’s Horticulture & Agroforestry Research Programme (HARP) for field trials of important crops.

But documents accessed by The Indian Express under the Right to Information (RTI) Act reveal that the legislators’ housing co-operative society — of which Koda is a member —first rejected land offered at another site, in Malsiring village. It was then that the government initiated the process of clearing HARP land for the society.

There’s a big difference in the market price of land in Malsiring and HARP land that the state cabinet is in the process of clearing for the society: the former sells for some Rs 2 lakh per acre; the latter, along the busy Ranchi-Jamshedpur highway, could sell for as much as Rs 1 crore per acre.

The documents show that the Vidhayak Evam Saansad Grih Nirman Swalambhi Sahkari Samiti Ltd was constituted in 2002 with 117 members, including Koda. Each member deposited Rs 75,000 with this society.

On August 3, 2004, the state government transferred 38.43 acres in Malsiring to the society. The village is where a new state capital was to be built, but the project was scrapped. With that, chances of the land price going up evaporated.

The revenue department asked the society to pay Rs 74.93 lakh and take the land but the society rejected the offer.

“When nobody was ready to take the land, we told the concerned officials to get us some other land,” said C P Singh, the society’s CEO. “We were then shown HARP land and we agreed to take it.”

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