It’s been said before but Gautam packs the punch with full force.

A loser - that’s who I am. Or that’s what politicians have made me feel like. On the one hand, we have 18,271 houses that have either illegally encroached spaces or are downright unauthorised. On the other, are people like us, who, armed with nothing more than their skills and a banker’s confidence that we will be able to turn those skills into 20 year long income streams, are appalled at the idea of crossing the line to the dark side. Where darkness is defined as cheaper, faster, larger, more convenient, better located, carrying a huge investment potential and every thing that we aspire for in our living space. [..]

Politicians like the unauthorised construction business because it is a full-fledged, fast growing parallel economy. It is fuelled on the one side by vote banks by regularising large tracks of illegally occupied land, and on the other side by politicians manipulating policy to monetise encroachments. As of this minute there are over a hundred colonies occupying prime acres, hectares and square kilometres of land — all illegal — awaiting regularisation.

Let’s take just one colony, a 50-acre, 700-plot, 3,000-family, noble sounding Freedom Fighters’ Enclave (FFE). Flanked by another unauthorised area occupied by the most influential people of Delhi, Sainik Farms, on one side, by a village on the other and by Saket, a middle to upmarket area, on the third. In Saket, land prices stand in the range of Rs 75,000-100,000 per sq yard. Cross the MB Road and a kilometre down, is the FFE, where the ruling price is Rs 25,000-30,000 per sq yard. What happens when FFE gets regularised? It is expected that prices will triple overnight.

I came across this area about six years ago, in November 1999 when a small-time businessman who bribes his way into everything, from his child’s admission to his house, gave me a tip. He said, buy a plot in FFE, where he lives. It’s going cheap at Rs 3,000 per square yard and is going to be regularised soon. How right he’s going to turn out to be — and how wealthy.

The journey of FFE began in 1982, when a school teacher from a neighbouring village, Neb Sarai, formed a society, bought agricultural land from farmers, cut residential plots in it and sold it to people for Rs 50 a square yard. During the next two-and-a-half decades, the value of this land has grown at a compounded rate of 28 per cent per annum. To put that figure in perspective, an investment of Rs 10 lakh in FFE in 1982 is worth Rs 50 crore now.

This regularisation business has turned into a revenue model — for the corrupt. A property dealer in the FFE area is quick to advise me to “buy now, the colony will be among the first to get regularised”. He also rattles off names of some politicians and their nephews who are buying land there today. “This can’t be demolished because the only crime here is that you’re not allowed to build on agricultural land, unlike in other places where DDA land has been encroached or bylaws violated.”

There is no end to this. The plan to move court and regularise the colonies that are in existence today, like a one-time amnesty, is not going to work because it is already 13 years beyond the last year of regularisation, 1992. If politicians say let’s end it as on 2005, it will mean nothing because they will attempt to seek the court’s sympathy all over again a few years later. There’s a pattern here to protect the big guns but fire from the smaller, narrower, weaker shoulders of ‘public interest’.

Of course.

When you vote and trust criminals, they’ll naturally end up furthering the Cause of Crime. There must be something seriously wrong with the nation’s conscience, which allows 80% of the people to remain inert as crime after ghastly crime is committed by these worthies.