Team Herald
PANJIM: The High Court of Bombay at Goa on Monday issued a notice to the State government in a public interest litigation filed by Goa Foundation challenging the inquiry committee report declaring the land acquired by Leading Hotels Pvt Ltd to set up a golf course at Tiracol as non-tenanted land.
A division bench comprising Justices Gautam Patel and Nutan Sardesai issued the notice to the government and posted the matter for admission and interim relief on November 14.
The PIL has pleaded that the report by Inquiry Officer, Deputy Collector Dharbandora Agnelo Fernandes, be kept aside and called for fresh inquiry or any other alternative mechanism to conduct the inquiry.
The Foundation has argued that it cannot intervene in proceedings between landlords and tenants. However, it is convinced that the agricultural lands of Tiracol cannot be converted into a golf course. If this is permitted, the entire Agricultural Tenancy Act and the Goa Land Use Act would become nullities.Goa Foundation recalled that the Court, in its order dated March 31, had directed Fernandes, to hear Leading Hotels and the various parties to the dispute and submit a report on the tenancy status of the lands as of 2.11.1990, which is the date of the coming into force of the Goa Land Use Act, 1991.
Goa Foundation alleged that the Deputy Collector rejected the voluminous record of tenancy placed before him on grounds that he was bound by the decisions of several civil courts and mamlatdars which had held that the tenants’ names on Forms I & XIV were in the nature of “erroneous entries” and therefore could be deleted from the records.
“The High Court itself had held that such decisions were doubtful in view of the fact that they had been arrived at on the basis of concessions from tenants and were not based on evidence. For this reason, the High Court had directed the parties to appear before the Deputy Collector so he could make an inquiry and find out what the situation was in 1990,” the PIL stated.
The Deputy Collector, who was the consensus candidate for the inquiry, in his submission in September, came to the conclusion after hearing the matter over five months that the land in question was not vested with the tenants as on the date when the Goa Land Act came into force. The report was in complete contradiction to the report of inquiry officer Sandip Jacques, who had pointed out that the land at Tiracol, or parts of it, was indeed agricultural but remained inconclusive on whether the land was indeed tenanted.
