Puri: The district unit of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has opposed sale of Bagala Dharmashala land to lodging house owners who had been evicted for beautification of the Srimandir surroundings.
Activists of the saffron party led by Puri MLA Jayanta Kumar Sarangi, Brahmagiri MLA Lalitendu Bidyadhar Mahapatra, BJP district unit president Ashrit Patnaik Friday staged a dharna in front of Bagala Dharmashala (shelter house) here and asked the district administration to refrain from selling the shelter house land to anyone.
The district administration had earlier sold 340 decimals of Bagala Dharmashala to six evicted lodging house owners.
“A benevolent person had established Bagala Dharmashala in Puri to provide night shelter facility to devotees. Poor devotees used to stay in this dharmashala by paying just Rs 20 each for a day. Besides, locals were organising weddings and other social functions by paying only Rs 100. The state government had illegally transferred the dharmashala land to the ownership of the revenue department. Now, the administration is selling the land to private parties,” Sarangi alleged.
Sarangi asked the district administration to stop selling the dharmashala land immediately and cancel the sale deeds with six evicted lodging house owners. “The administration is free to sell any other government land to evicted people,” he said. The Puri MLA further claimed that around Rs 3 crore has been spent from a central scheme to improve infrastructure at the dharamashala recently.
It is worth mentioning here that Kanheialal Bagala had set up a shelter house for devotees in the Holy City here by purchasing land from the Bengal government in 1899. Bagala had donated the land and the dharmashala to Puri Collector in 1905. At present, the shelter house has 2 acre and 574 decimal land at Balagandi revenue village here, sources said.
