THE LAND PANGS

The Yogi Adityanath government’s dream of converting into reality investment proposals worth Rs 35 lakh crore received at the Global Investors Summit 2023 in February faces a major hurdle—providing land for the new projects.

- Ashish Misra

For, it has to identify the poorly demarcated industrial pockets scattered across Uttar Pradesh, cancel the allotment of plots where no factories have come up and free them of illegal encroachments, if any.

And it’s a gaushala set up on an industrial plot in Fatehpur district that has made the government wake up to this daunting task, while also turning the spotlight on cabinet minister Rakesh Sachan for alleged irregularities in the allotment of industrial plots. Curiously, not as the MSME (micro, small and medium enterprises) minister in the present BJP regime, but as the Samajwadi Party MP from Fatehpur in May 2012, when 72 industrial plots were allotted to his two educational institutes in the district.

Everything seemed hunky-dory earlier this year until the Laghu Udyog Bharati (LUB)—an all-India organisation of small industries affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)—decided to pitch in with the Yogi government’s preparations for the investors’ summit. On January 5, Satyendra Singh Patel, the Fatehpur district president of the organisation, formed teams to take stock of eight industrial areas in the district. Ten days later, when Patel reached the Chakhata mini industrial area in Bindki, he was surprised to find a temporary gaushala, housing 370 stray cows, set up on an industrial plot.

On making enquiries, he found that 32 plots, including the one with the cow shelter (established by the district administration five years ago), are registered in the name of Sachan’s institutes. Two days later, another LUB team found 40 plots allotted to Sachan’s institutes at the Sudhwapur Pauli mini-industrial area in Airaya. Not a single industrial unit had come up on any of these plots. And not a single penny had been paid to the government to date.