‘Let Gill panel probe all SRA cases’
After the Bombay High Court directed the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) to probe all the 247 complaints registered against Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) approved projects in Mumbai, the state government has now approached the court to hand the cases over to the GS Gill committee.
Earlier on March 21, 2007, a one-man committee of serving principal secretary GS Gill had been assigned the task to make a preliminary enquiry into the complaints of large scale corruption. However, after the order passed by Justice JN Patel and Justice SC Dharmadhikari on March 29, cases involving only government officers were to be probed by the Gill Committee and those involving government officers, developers and private parties as well, were to be investigated by the ACB directly.
On an earlier occasion before the court passed its order on March 29, Advocate General Ravi Kadam had said that the March 21 order of the court wherein the Gill committee was constituted was very clear and further hearings in the case were not required.
But after the court bifurcated the investigations of strictly government officials and those involving private parties, RTI activist Shailesh Gandhi had opposed the proposition saying that if the state government had not already started investigating the cases as per the court’s order, the purpose of the order was not served.
The court had asked the ACB to complete its investigations and file a report in six months. “However good an order may be, what is the point if it is not enforced?” Gandhi remarked. Chief Justice Swatanter Kumar and Justice SC Dharmadhikari will hear the case today.