By IANS
Lucknow : A public interest litigation (PIL) was moved Friday before the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High court seeking restraint on the Uttar Pradesh government’s plan to pull down a sprawling bungalow here, which was allotted to Mayawati during her earlier stint as chief minister.
Bungalow number 13-A at the Mall Avenue was allotted to Mayawati way back in the mid-nineties during her first tenure as chief minister when the state government spent a whopping Rs.8 million on its renovation. Every time Mayawati rode to power, the house was further spruced up.
This time Mayawati came up with a more ambitious plan: to expand the existing 33,000 sq feet premises into a jumbo-sized estate by encompassing the adjoining 100,000 sq feet land belonging to a state government office.
With the office having been razed more than a month back, the government is all set to build a new house for the chief minister so that she can live in added luxury after her tenure as the chief minister.
An old rule allots government bungalows to all former chief ministers in the state.
Mulayam Singh Yadav was the first chief minister, who pumped in official resources to ensure bigger and larger comforts for him in the bungalow he had picked up for his days as a former chief minister.
While the court was willing to hear out the case in view of a prayer that the bungalow was about to be demolished, the case was deferred following an assurance by advocate general Jyotindra Misra that it would not be pulled down immediately. The case is now, therefore, likely to come up before the court on Monday.