Hyderabad, October 12: Several opposition parties today staged a dharna at the disputed 3,831 square yard plot belonging to the ENT Hospital, Koti, as the alleged encroachers of the land have taken up construction work recently.
A few years ago, the state government took a decision to regularise a portion of the hospital in favour of A Venkatesh, A Krishna and A Ramesh.
CPM city secretariat member M Srinivas said that Government Orders 627, 628 and 629 were issued following the recommendation made by then Hyderabad collector Navin Mittal. “But later it was found that the recommendations were being made in violation of GO 166. As per the GO, any land already meant for the purpose of public use should not be regularised. Even if the said land is of high worth, still the government cannot regularise it. Both these criteria were fit for rejecting the regularisation application moved by three encroachers,” Srinivas said.
Though the three Government Orders have been kept in abeyance, the litigants continued to construct a gate disregarding the fact that the case is pending in the High Court.
Communist Party of India MP Aziz Pasha said the Koti ENT hospital is the number one hospital in the country. But some land-grabbers, in collusion with influential persons in the government, got the land regularised. “There is a lot of scope to use the land for the hospital expansion instead of giving it to private persons, that too illegally,” Aziz Pasha said.
Four months ago, Hyderabad collector Natarajan Gulzar wrote a letter to the state government informing that the recommendation to regularise the land was made to the government without consulting the hospital superintendent and hence the regularisation order should be scraped. “But till now the government did not give any reply to the letter,” Srinivas added.
The members of CPM, CPI, TDP and TRS also participated in the dharna.
—Agencies