11 days before Sonbhadra killing, DM junked 11 appeals by tribals

Lucknow: Five months before the Sonbhadhra land dispute snowballed into a flare-up, as many as 11 appeals were submitted by villagers of Umbha to the district magistrate, requesting him to return 1,000 acre transferred in the name of the gram pradhan, Yagya Dutt. This was revealed in the damning report of the three-member inquiry committee.
District magistrate, Sonbhadra, Ankit Agarwal junked these pleas on technical grounds on July 6.
Eleven days later, the dispute sparked a bloody altercation between villagers and aides of gram Pradhan Yagya Dutt, who’s reportedly affiliated to Samajwadi Party, the report said.
Two appeals — one by Prakash Narayan Singh and another by Mauleshwar Prasad Singh of Shazadpur village in Vaishali district of Bihar — are still pending in the court of DM Sonbhadra.
The appeals are scheduled to be heard on August 9 by the newly appointed DM S Ramalingam.
The report also indicts Asha Mishra and Vinita Sharma, wives of two retired IAS officers Prabhat Mishra and Bhanu Pratap Sharma, for fraudulent allocation of 18 acre in their names in 1989. They were booked late Sunday by Hazratganj police. The disputed land was transferred in the name of gram pradhan Yagya Dutt on October 17, 2017. A year later, Dutt’s aides tried to take possession of land tilled by Gond tribals, but were unsuccessful.
The report points out that as many as 140 families were dependent on the land for three generations.
The villagers had been paying a cultivation fee to Neeraj Roy, a representative of Adarsh Cooperative Society that was formed in December 17, 1955. The report clearly states that transferring gram sabha to a cooperative society was illegal.
The report criticizes police for not taking action against gram pradhan and his aides, which helped to boost their morale and open fire on unarmed tribals. Circle officer of Ghorawal police station Abhishek Singh was indicted by the probe panel for slapping Goonda Act and other criminal charges on villagers. A departmental inquiry has been constituted against Additional SP Arun Kumar Dixit for taking Rs 1.42 lakh from the gram pradhan to evacuate the tribals.