Vadodara, Oct. 20 -- Months after Yusuf Pathan broke away from the Trinamool Congress, the Gujarat government has proposed to hand over a long-disputed municipal plot in Vadodara to the former cricketer, gifting 500 square metres of the land and offering the rest at a concessional rate.
The proposal, submitted by the Vadodara municipal commissioner, will be presented for final approval before the BJP-ruled civic body's standing committee on October 23, as per the agenda shared on Monday.
The proposal comes nearly four months after Pathan, who was elected from West Bengal's Baharampur in 2024, joined a group of 20 TMC MPs who broke away from the Mamata Banerjee-led fold and merged with the NCPI (Nationalist Citizens Party of India) to join the NDA ranks in Parliament.
Pathan had been seeking the 978-square-metre residential plot located next to his family home in Vadodara's Tandalja locality since 2012, but faced years of legal hurdles and encroachment notices from the civic body.
As per the new proposal, 500 square metres of the VMC-owned land will be "gifted" to Pathan, while the remaining 478 square metres will be offered at a 45 per cent concession - valued at 55 per cent of the rate fixed by the Vadodara Urban Development Authority (VUDA) Valuation Committee.
The allotment will be made "subject to specific terms and conditions" in accordance with a 2024 resolution issued by the state's Urban Development and Urban Housing Department, the proposal states.
The plot has been at the centre of a decade-long dispute between the cricketer-turned-politician and the civic body. In 2012, Pathan had requested to purchase the land adjacent to his home. Though the VMC initially agreed, the Gujarat government rejected the sale in 2014.
In 2024, after Pathan was elected to the Lok Sabha from Baharampur in West Bengal on a TMC ticket, the civic body issued him a notice asking him to remove the alleged encroachment and vacate the VMC-owned land.
Pathan challenged the notice before the Gujarat High Court, arguing that the matter was more than a decade old and that the civic body should have issued a show-cause notice before asking him to clear the alleged encroachment.
He also contended that the land belonged to the municipal corporation and not the state government.
The High Court subsequently upheld the state government's decision to reject his request for plot allotment. Pathan challenged the order before a division bench, but in August this year, the appeal was dismissed as withdrawn after his lawyer told the court that he was pursuing his claim under the state government's policy.
The latest proposal, if approved by the standing committee, would pave the way for the allotment of the disputed plot under the terms outlined by the municipal commissioner.
Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.