Express News Service: Wed Dec 01 2010,
Mumbai: Two officials of the Urban Development department were summoned by the Mumbai Police Crime Banch Unit-1 to record their statements in connection with the pages that have gone missing in a file pertaining to the Adarsh Housing Society.
Assistant town planner Ashok Pati and UDD clerk Vidya Dhabolkar were summoned to the Marine Drive Police station on Sunday.
“Statements of both the officials were recorded. Earlier, when an RTI application was filed seeking the documents, Patil had replied stating that the file was missing. Subsequently, the department had started searching for the file. Dhabolkar found the file, but then the notings on the file were missing,” said a crime branch official, on condition of anonymity.
The missing papers dealt with the change in road width, change from “road” to “residential purposes” creating room for Adarsh. The notings on the missing pages were made around 2000-2003 during the tenure of Ramanand Tiwari as principal secretary and P V Deshmukh as deputy secretary, sources said. UD officials say the notings pertain to reduction of the width of Captain Prakash Pethe Marg from 60.97m to 18.40m. A huge chunk of this road was in the residential zone; this included part of the plot on which the 31-storey building has come up. The papers also had notings by department officials who finally allowed the society to carry out construction in the eco-sensitive CRZ II zone using a routine Ministry of Environment and Forests (MOEF) letter as a go-ahead for development.
Crime Branch officials had visited the UDD at the Mantralaya on Monday as the file was being handled by the department. The officials wanted to understand the functioning of the department.
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