Cuttack, Sept. 10: A petition filed in Orissa High Court has sought a CBI probe into alleged abuse of official positions by bureaucrats and ministers in allotment of residential plots through discretionary quota in Bhubanes-war and Cuttack.

The petition alleged that the Bhubaneswar Development Authority and the Cuttack Development Authority had distributed state largesse in “arbitrary and discriminatory” manner by way of allotment of plots of land “at concessional rates to influential persons” between 1991 and 2011.

The petition, filed by way of a PIL by Kamal Kant Jaswal, director of Common Cause, a New Delhi-based organisation along with Cuttack-based social activist Jayanti Das, expected the high court to order a CBI probe and monitor it.

Earlier, they had filed a petition in the Supreme Court, challenging the discretionary allotment of prime residential plots to influential persons in Gujrat and Odisha. The Supreme Court had dismissed the petition on February 21, but granted liberty to them to move the high court.

The division bench of Chief Justice Amitava Roy and Justice A.K. Rath, before which the petition came up on Monday, adjourned the matter till the petitioner counsel submits the background in which the top court had declined to consider their petition.

The petition, along with copies of list of influential persons allotted land (assessed through RTI), has also sought “cancellation of the entire allotment of plots of land by the development authorities to government officials, MPs, MLAs, judges and others through discretionary quota since 1991”.

The PIL was moved in the high court at a time when there has been a clamour for a CBI probe by Opposition parties and the state government had formed a task force, headed by additional chief secretary Taradatt, to probe irregularities regarding allotment of plots and houses under the quota.

The task force, formed a month ago, has been assigned the job of examining cases between January 1, 1995 and July 31, 2014 in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack urban areas in respect of all cases of allotment of land, flats and houses out of the quota. It will also review allotment of more than one plot of land, flat and house to the members of the same family and submit report within four months.

In December 2011, the high court had dismissed on grounds of maintainability of a PIL seeking CBI probe into the alleged misuse of the discretionary quota in allotment of land to judges and officers of the IAS and the IPS cadres by the development bodies. Niranjan Tripathy, a resident of Patkura in Kendrapada district, had filed the PIL.