Cuttack, Aug. 16: The state government has sought Orissa High Court's consent to open a museum dedicated to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose at the freedom fighter's ancestral house in Puri.

The government filed an application seeking permission as the court had issued a status quo order on the property four years ago. The court has fixed August 24 to consider on the application.

According to official records, Bose's father, Janakinath, built the house in 1916 at Mati Mandap Sahi in Puri on 0.434 acres. The then Puri collector had allotted the land to him on lease for residential purposes. The lease was to be renewed once every 30 years. After Janakinath passed away in 1938, the land and the building were recorded in the name of Netaji and other members of his family. Later, the lease was accordingly updated several times.

In 1997, the family's descendants had demanded a permanent patta for the bungalow, sparking off a legal dispute between the collector's office and the family before the court of the revenue divisional commissioner (central).

Later, Netaji's family members urged the commissioner to exclude the freedom fighter's name from the owners' list. The matter had been left pending for years till February 2013, when the then commissioner, Aravind Padhee, rejected the plea and directed the district administration to acquire the land and the building. Accordingly, the district administration took control of the land on March 3, 2013.

Subsequently, Supriyo Bose, who is Netaji's grand nephew - the grandson of his eldest brother Satish, and other descendants of the family challenged the takeover in the high court that same year and managed to get the status quo order.

The case has since languished in the court till it came up last week and the state's application was taken up.

"After a preliminary hearing, the division bench of Justice B.K. Nayak and Justice D.P. Choudhury posted the matter to August 24 for hearing, along with the case records," state counsel Bibhu Prasad Tripathy told The Telegraph.

"The court has accordingly called for the case records, on the basis of which the state government had decided to convert the house into a museum," he said.

The court called for the records after the state government informed that it had already spent around Rs 4 crore in transforming the century-old house into a museum dedicated to Netaji. The court was also informed that the government was ready to reimburse the money that the family had spent on the building.

The building was in a dilapidated state when the district administration took it over in 2013. The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, which was entrusted with the restoration, had restored it by using traditional techniques in lime plaster to retain the house's original architecture.

As part of the museum project, old furniture in the house have been conserved and the entire premises landscaped. An open-air pandal has also been constructed with plans to hold cultural programmes for tourists. Efforts were on to display rare pictures, documents, journals and magazines related to Netaji at the museum to draw tourists.