Amartya Sen on Thursday said the state government had formally transferred in his name the lease for the 1.38 acres on which his ancestral home Pratichi in Santiniketan stands, and which was till recently recorded in the name of his father Ashutosh Sen.
“It (the land) was recorded in the name of my father. It had to be transferred to my name and that has happened. The office of the BLRO (block land and land reforms officer) did it (transfer of the lease). There was no reason for not doing it,” Sen told reporters.
“It was clearly written in the will of my father that my mother would get the right to the property after his death, and it would come to me after the death of my mother.”
Sen left his Santiniketan home on Thursday afternoon after a little over a month’s stay in the university town.
A source close to the Nobel-winning economist said that Sen would travel to London and then to the US, where he is Thomas W. Lamont University Professor at Harvard University.
The trigger behind the land row was a letter that Visva-Bharati sent to Sen on January 24 asking him to return 13 decimals (0.13 acres) of land that it accused him of occupying without authorisation. Amid widespread public condemnation of the letter, chief minister Mamata Banerjee met Sen at Pratichi and assured him that an inquiry by the state government had revealed that the university’s allegations were baseless. As news of the transfer of the lease in favour of Sen spread on the Visva-Bharati campus, there was a sense of relief among the Santiniketan community.
“It is really good news that the state government has finally done the lease transfer.… The entire episode was in poor taste and everyone sensed that the vice-chancellor was trying to harass Professor Sen for personal gain. We are happy that the VC has got a fitting reply,” said Sudripta Tagore, a member of Rabindranath Tagore’s family.
Multiple sources in the Birbhum district administration said a senior officer from Suri, the district headquarters, had on Wednesday evening called up Sen and confirmed that the process of transferring the lease in his name had been completed.
“He was keen on resolving it before returning to the US.… The last one month or so had been difficult for him after the varsity authorities, especially VC Bidyut Chakrabarty, openly accused him of unauthorised possession of 13 decimals of land,” a source close to Sen said.
“That dispute has been settled as the state government has transferred the lease of the entire 1.38 acres of land in his name. He was relieved, indeed.”
On February 10, Sen had sent a letter to the block land and land reforms officer, Bolpur, requesting him to transfer the lease of the 1.38 acres in his name.
The land department conducted a hearing on the plea on February 20, during which the Visva-Bharati lawyer argued that Sen was the legal heir only to 1.25 acres, which she said the varsity had leased out to his father.
“Though Visva-Bharati lawyers tried their best to prevent the transfer of the lease, they didn’t have the necessary documents to buttress their case.... So, there was no legal hurdle to the transfer of the lease in favour of Sen and the process was completed smoothly,” a senior land department official said.
Land department officials confirmed that the transfer of the lease had been done but said the documents had not yet been uploaded on the online portal that contains all land-related records. “The formal uploading of the land records, after the change in the name of the lessee, normally takes some time,” an official said. Sen’s family has been an integral part of the Visva-Bharati community since the days of Rabindranath. The poet had invited Sen’s maternal grandfather Kshitimohan Sen, a Sanskrit scholar, to join Visva-Bharati in 1908.
Kshitimohan played a key role in building the university along with Rabindranath. It is widely known that Sen, born in 1933, was named Amartya by the poet.
