Cuttack, Aug. 5: A PIL filed in Orissa High Court has sought a CBI probe into land grabbing in Bhubaneswar. It gives a new lease of life to the decade-old multi-crore land scam, which the CID-crime branch had been asked to probe.

Odia Yuva Manch president R.K. Mohanty has filed the PIL.

The scam involved acquisition of more than 660 acres of government land, the cost of which might exceed Rs 3,000 crore, at Gadakan, Chandrasekharpur, Pandara and Patia in Bhubaneswar by private parties on the basis of fraudulent land records, the petition alleged.

Mohanty said "the crime branch did not undertake proper investigation, because some influential persons and bureaucrats, including political leaders, were involved in such fraudulent act".

According to the petition, since 2005, the department had written letters to the crime branch on four occasions to probe into the cases. The last communication was on May 31, 2014.

In all the cases, private parties had staked claim in the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation area on the plea that they had got the land from ex-intermediary of Kanika estate on lease, and subsequently after the vesting of the estate to the state government, they received the rent receipts. The claims were based on hata pattas, said to be given by the ex-intermediary.

The fraudulent land records were prepared craftily to hoodwink the authorities at different stages and finally manage to get decrees in their favour at the high court.

The scam had surfaced in November-December 2005 when the advocate-general's office, in a confidential letter, alerted the general administration department about the filing of increasing number of petitions in the high court in respect of government lands.

A special inquiry by the board of revenue involving verification of records under the Bhubaneswar tehsil detected systematic manipulation and tampering of land records for preparing the stage for staking claim over government land by private persons.

Subsequently, the general administration department identified nearly a hundred cases in which ownership had been claimed on the basis of fraudulent land records, and asked the CID-crime branch to investigate. The outcome of the probe is not known.

The petitioner efforts to get information on the fate of the cases under the RTI had yielded no result so far. On submission of application, the general administration transferred it to the CID-crime branch, which "refused to provide the information on the ground that the information sought for is prohibited", the petition said.