EC notice to Shinde: Madan proves calculations wrong

MUMBAI: What goes around comes around. This is the general feeling in IAS circles after state chief electoral officer U P S Madan issued a notice to Maharashtra CM Sushilkumar Shinde on Monday, based on a complaint that he had grossly undervalued his Pali Hill flat while declaring his assets.
A soft-spoken officer from the 1984 batch, Madan has been considered too harmless to even hurt a fly."But by daring to take cognisance of a complaint against no less a person than the CM himself, Madan has shown that he is capable of taking the bull by the horns," says a senior Mantralaya official.
Early this year, Madan was abruptly shunted out as vice-president of the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority (MHADA) by CM himself, following pressure from some builders.
A few developers had been hounding Madan and were using their political connections to get him transferred out of MHADA mainly because he had refused to do their bidding. The CM then said that he had shunted him out because he was not taking quick decisions about allotting MHADA land and fetching revenue.
However, it was believed that an influential builder from the western suburbs was instrumental in getting Madan removed because he was a stumbling block in the builder''s designs to acquire the housing board''s plots at throwaway prices. Madan had managed to scuttle an attempt to award a composite building project worth crores of rupees on a sprawling MHADA plot near Bandra Reclamation to this developer. He had wanted to hand over this project to the highest bidder by calling for tenders because the proposals from builders were not attractive enough.