Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy on Wednesday gave his consent to initiate action against Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation special commissioner Navin Mittal. Mr Mittal is facing allegations of committing irregularities in land-related issues during his stint as the Hyderabad collector. Sources told this newspaper that the government will ask current Hyderabad collector N. Gulzar to prepare the articles of charges. It had been Mr Gulzar who had noticed the irregularities and submitted a report to the government.
“The government will ask Mr Mittal to submit his replies to the charges and decide whether to entrust the case to the Commissioner of Inquiry,” a senior official said. The government had constituted an inquiry by senior bureaucrat Minnie Mathew in March 2012 following an uproar in the Assembly over irregularities during Mr Mittal’s tenure which, Opposition members said, had resulted in the government losing land worth hundreds of crores of rupees in the city. The order, however, had been kept confidential and the inquiry was seen more as a delaying tactic by the government.
There was, however, a hurdle in the process with Ms Mathew declining to conduct a fresh inquiry. Sources said she had written back to the government to frame charges based on the previous preliminary inquiry which had been conducted by the then chief land administration commissioner and present chief secretary Pankaj Dwivedi. The top bureaucrat had submitted his report to the government in February 2011. The government had not been keen to act on Mr Dwivedi’s report and the CM had delayed the issue for more than a year and not given his opinion on a future course of action. When the Opposition made an issue of the irre-gularities, the CM had ordered another inquiry.