Samikhsya Bureau
When one visits a government office, and that too for a work related to a personal interest and legitimately so, one is bound to be perturbed not for the power the structure enjoys but, by the sheer mind-set in which sentiments and urgency of an individual is given a short-shrift.
And that too with an unexpressed intent for complacency that is full of a kind of sadistic pleasure.
A case in point is the government houses meant for people, be it an ordinary man or the ones in power, regulated through official agencies like Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA), Housing Board or the CDA.
Norms those drive procedures
It is all the same and each one of them is driven by one preamble and that is to lord over a buyer, who pays through his or her nose and then runs amuck for rest of his life to obtain a legitimacy as owner of the house.
A breed of such assumptive owners were from an ilk who had obtained allotment of houses under a provision called ‘ discretionary quota’.
Which, in fact, stands apart for only one reason, and that is, one gets the allotment not being in any queue or lottery.
Else, there is no relaxation over the price whatsoever, but there is a notional assumption that, houses allotted under such provision were given away at a drastically low price. Which is not true.
Subsequently, there was an apparition few years back when the entire gamut was brought under a Special Task Force(STF) headed by one officer who could discover many devils in the provision and attempted the changes in the official terminologies and did away with all that linked to one’s lifetime possession and sustenance for survival.
Like ‘shooting a messanger’
All of a sudden the norms of allotment were dubbed as illegal hence were deemed fit for cancellation . It was a kind of sweeping perception that viewed both, single and more than one allotments, shorn of legitimacy so, notices were served to the owners for show-cause , which were replied by a majority of such owners .
It may be recalled that, when the provision for such allotments were in vogue, there was no trace of any STF and the so called moral ombudsman was nowhere to see the rot in the provision.
Whatever happened, it happened through an injection of wisdom in hind sight of the STF etc and the state government itself staggering under media pressure.
When one buys a property and that too, a home, investing his lifetime savings, suddenly loses the right to its possession and right to sell or mortgage in acute crisis.
In what way an allottee is responsible? This is a reprehensible caricature mocking at people who bought the houses with all due diligence in place then. While allotting the houses the only moratorium was that, the allottee cannot dispose of or sublease the property before six years from the time of allotment.
Today, hundreds of such people have moved the court pleading for directions to enable them to be called as owners of the houses through deeds .
But, the delays appear like warnings against a norm called, belongingness, as adequately reflected by the pioneering thrust on the word ‘Mo’ by the chief minister. If we cannot call our own house as ‘ Mo Ghar’ (My house) then rest smacks of pretensions only.
