Over 4,500 Acres Of 13 Odisha Temples In Illegal Occupation: CAG Report

According to the latest audit report on general the and social sector for the year ending March 2020 by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), over 4,500 acres of land of six temples in the state are under encroachment. The CAG of India questioned the Odisha Government over mismanagement the of temples in the state.

Endowment Commissioner

"The religious institutions were not aware of the status of more than half of their properties which were not under their possession. There were lacunae in internal control measures like maintenance of property registers and their submission to the Endowment Commissioner," the CAG has pointed out. The administration has failed to recover some high-valued land patches belonging to the Lingaraj Temple, as per a report in The Hindu.

Meanwhile, the CAG, in its latest report, said that the Executive Officer of the Lingaraj Temple had intimated to the auditors that 36.370 acres out of 69.423 acres of land in Bhubaneswar were under encroachment. Furthermore, as many as 272 cases have been filed against the encroachers between 1990 and 2010. The Endowment Commission (EC) had disposed of 222 cases as of October 2019. The EC forwarded 196 cases to the District Collector, Khordha, for eviction of encroachments.

'Failure To Trace & Track Properties'

The file says 9 kg of gold has been discovered to be in 'unauthorised' custody.

"Failure to trace and track properties owned by these RIs bears the risk of the ownership of property getting changed over the course of time or it becoming more difficult to recover the encroached land," the CAG observed.

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