Vadodara: Months after Yusuf Pathan broke away from the Trinamool Congress, the Gujarat government has proposed to hand over a long-disputed municipal plot in Vadodara to the former cricketer, gifting 500 square metres of the land and offering the rest at a concessional rate.
The proposal, submitted by the Vadodara municipal commissioner, will be presented for final approval before the BJP-ruled civic body's standing committee on October 23. As per the new terms, 500 square metres of the VMC-owned land will be "gifted" to Mr. Pathan, while the remaining 478 square metres will be offered at a 45 per cent concession, valued at 55 per cent of the rate fixed by the Vadodara Urban Development Authority's valuation committee.
The 978-square-metre residential plot is located next to Mr. Pathan's family home in Vadodara's Tandalja locality and has been at the centre of a decade-long dispute. Mr. Pathan, the MP from Baharampur in West Bengal, had been seeking the land since 2012. The State government rejected the sale in 2014. In 2024, after he was elected to the Lok Sabha on a Trinamool Congress ticket, the civic body issued him a notice to remove an alleged encroachment. He challenged the notice in the Gujarat High Court, which upheld the State government's rejection. An appeal was dismissed as withdrawn on August 31 this year.
The proposal comes nearly four months after Mr. Pathan joined a group of 20 Trinamool Congress MPs who broke away from the Mamata Banerjee-led fold and merged with the Nationalist Citizens Party of India to join the NDA ranks in Parliament.
If approved by the standing committee, the proposal would pave the way for the allotment of the disputed plot under the terms outlined by the municipal commissioner.