Caught in the political storm over the ISRO land deal at Ponmudi, Kerala Chief Secretary Lizzie Jacob on Thursday sought to quit, and has proceeded on leave from Friday. Jacob was to retire next February.Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan confirmed that she has applied for three months leave, but refused to discuss further. She is the state’s seniormost IAS official from the 1971 batch, and the second woman to hold that position in the state. The ISRO had asked the state for land to set up the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology accessible from its Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thiruvananthapuram. With the Government failing to respond, the ISRO bought 219 acres of land from a private plantation, the Merchiston Estate, in Ponmudi.The Government soon found that the land bought was originally notified as “ecologically fragile”, which ipso facto meant it should be vested with the Forest Department—in other words, the ISRO could not put up the prestigious institute there even though the Government had never taken actual possession of this land.The Chief Secretary had sanctioned Rs 1 crore to construct a helipad on the land ISRO bought, as directed by the Prime Minister’s Office. However, the land is yet to be denotified as ecologically fragile if such a construction is to be allowed there. On Wednesday, Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan said Jacob had erred in not even informing him and the Cabinet before doing that. That apart, she has been slammed by the CPI, which holds the Forest portfolio, for the role of officials in the deal the Congress-led Opposition too had been demanding that she be made to step aside and a comprehensive probe be ordered.The issue ran into more complications after the Forest Department shot off a notice asking ISRO to get out of the deal, and the organisation countered that it would take legal steps if the notice was not withdrawn, maintaining it was convinced that there could be no legal hindrance to setting up the project there. The seller, Xavi Mano Mathew, too, claimed his land really could not be put under the ecologically fragile lands category, and demanded that it be denotified.The Opposition was quick to allege that the Forest Minister was involved in helping Mathew palm off ecologically fragile land to ISRO, while the minister insisted otherwise. The Government, meanwhile, has offered the ISRO 200 acres of land elsewhere free of cost to shift the IIST project. Revenue officials reported there was no such Government land to spare for the project. Embarrassed, the Government has instituted a probe by the Principal Secretary (Revenue) into how the officials came to that conclusion.
