This man has not been a minister. But he held sway over Goas IndustrialDevelopment Corporation, presiding over the loot of Goas exchequer, byfraudulent allotment of huge plots to mega companies to set up SEZ’s. The Highcourt has explicitly said they were done “in a manner not known to law”. The Goagovernment was forced to scrap the SEZ allotments and then withdraw the SEZpolicy. But three years later not a finger has been raised againstBabu Kavlekar, other satraps like the then Industries minister Luizinho Faleiroand the then Chief Minister Pratap Singh Rane. The High Court, the CAG and ourfurther investigations show how the state first surreptitiously created groundconditions to benefit pre-selected developers and then crushed all rules toallot them land at manipulative prices.
This is the nerve center of the scam. While the violations and bendingof rules will run into pages, Goa should know how it lost because of theseviolations. This is how :
a) Lease rates for the SEZ area fixed lower than adjoining areas whenit should have been higher.
b) Additional land was subsequently given for further developmentwithout approval of the board
c) Land, ostensibly given forindustrial development, was actually meant for real estate development. (Seebox: How Goa lost)
If the scam is big enough for the government to withdraw its entirepolicy, why are those who clearly scripted, directed and allegedly benefitedfrom the scam free?Kavlekar as Chairman, allowed violations after violationsdetailed later, with his Managing Director’s son-in-law on the board of one ofthe companies given land.Pratap Singh Rane finds himself defending four wordsthat he wrote on a file “Please help these people” (on an application of one ofthe companies). But The Goan hasfound that he went a step further. He laid the foundation stone of theRaheja’s Mindspace “SEZ”, where he said that Goa should open its doors to exportoriented projects. In the same function, the Rahejas distributed a brochure oftheir project proudly claiming that it was a housing project spread across 275acres. Is this what the sentence “please help these people” meant?
d) Non-processing areas earmarked for SEZ’s were meant for commercialspaces, shopping malls, multiplexes and residential complexes. Industrial landcould not have been allotted for such purposes.
Just because the government has withdrawn its SEZ policy and scrappedthe SEZ’s, is it good enough? If the wrong doing has been arrested, shouldn’tthe wrong doers be arrested too? Normally those in government who willinglymake losses to the exchequer face trial and go to jail. Why not here?
